It isn't a happy Fourth of July. When the only good news you can find is in a cave in Thailand something is amiss in the world. When the far right government of Poland has purged their own version of the Supreme Court (see Protesters across the country accused the government of undermining the constitution with a power grab in the highest sanctum of the law" ) how can anyone not worry about a similar thing happening here?
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If you watched Rachel Maddow describe the power Putin has over Trump last night you must have thought you were living in a TV espionage drama where the United States president had been recruited by the former KGB agent head of Russia, known for having opponents murdered, by threats of blackmail or much, much worse.
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Trump thinks we are being invaded by aliens, perhaps like the malevolent outer-space beings in the movie Independence Day. Slimy-skinned killer aliens or bloodthirsty tattooed MS-13 gangbangers, you say tomatoes I say tomattoes.
In “Independence Day” the newcomers to the United States turn out to be anything but friendly and are hardly desperate. Our newcomers are friendly and desperate.
I feel like we are under siege, not by outer space aliens but by a Trumpian force of storm-troopers, pretend cops who never faced real danger, armed to the teeth wearing ICE on their jackets with ice in their veins. Trump and his minions are out to destroy all the freedoms and civil rights I’ve taken for granted.
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In real life, the newcomers to the land of the free (that’s supposed to be us) are friendly, frightened, and yearning to be free. They are with few exceptions refugees who believed in what has tragically become the myth of a welcoming America where people could realize their dreams of life free from fear and filled with opportunity.
Perhaps some of them think Obama is still president and they can’t comprehend that the United States has a cruel malignant narcissistic bigoted president whose idea of international problem-solving was just revealed as an utterly stupid exercise in machismo: invade Venezuela.
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