The Evil of Our Day: a thread
Make all the arguments you want about who these people are or what they were doing at the border, about media hype, about which president or party is responsible- none of it matters. This is happening right now, in your country, with your tax dollars, in your name.
Making fastidious arguments at this point is just willfully ignoring the problem, closing your eyes to this unquestionable evil. Do not kid yourself- if you are inclined to believe in evil, in wickedness, in sin- here it is, staring you in the face,
waving an American flag and telling you it’s time to be afraid. This a stain, an(other) ugly stain on our already uneven and often hypocritical legacy as the country of moral record.
I have never been able to really understand how we as the a country allowed the Japanese-American internment camps to happen during WW2, but sadly, I do now. How did that happen? All too easily, it would seem.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” - noted liberal and millennial snowflake Edmund Burke
(see, its funny because Burke is considered to be the founder of modern conservatism, because he was born a few generations too early to be able to explain to me the difference between Arctic Monkeys and Arcade Fire, and because snowflake is a stupid term used by stupid people)
Here’s the thing though, Eddie B- good men don’t “do nothing.” By doing nothing, by putting on that do nothing hat, you are, like a high profile senior athlete on signing day, telling the world that you’re gonna take your talents to evil beach. Good men don’t do nothing.
(good men also don’t make confused, meandering, out of place metaphors like that “talents to evil beach” thing I just did, but I will not apologize for art)
Good men, in the face of evil, in the face of absolute wrongness, in the face of something that is not only entirely incompatible with the core values that our Founding Fathers exalted as divinely given, acknowledged as existing like the laws of physics, apart from ourselves and
in every corner of the universe, but it is the antithesis of that spark of the holy, that moral core, picked as it was, like ripened grapes off the vine, from every corner of the universe and set to ferment deep in the dark, soft tissues of our heart.
You know this is wrong. We all know this is wrong. Some of us keep believing half-truths or outright lies to pretend it’s not wrong somehow. Some of us keep making excuses for why - if it is wrong - it’s still a “necessary” evil.
Some of us hide behind the weird self-righteous appeasement of “I don’t follow politics.” Some of us purposely ground our ship on the rocks of party politics or petty pedantics.
Some of us capsize the ship with - I dunno, icebergs? what am I even talking about anymore - of “the media is lying to us” and “the internment at the border is just a distraction by the deep state” or whatever.
Some of us share articles or tweet long pedantic thread rants using long pedantic words that we think make us sound smart and pedantic but don’t actually get us any closer to ridding the world of this inhumanity.
Which, to be honest, is a funny word to use here. How many centuries do we have to go on doing inhuman things to each other before we decide that’s just human.
Huffington Post wrote awhile back that they don’t know how to tell you you should care about other people, but let me give it a shot.
Maybe with this: 
Or these:
Or maybe this:
Or maybe just like this:
YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE YOU SELFISH PRICK
YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE YOU SELFISH PRICK
Or maybe we can bring things a little closure to home. Because here is the truth: if they can do this to them, they can do it to anybody. If you let this happen now, they’ll let it happen again when they come for you. For anything.
Being black, being male, owning a gun. Being Muslim, being Jewish, being Christian. Being conservative, having an accent, or being poor. Having credit card debt, having outstanding student loans, or owing money on your house you can’t afford.
If this is the precedent we allow them to set, then any administration going forward can use fear, security, tolerance, sovereignty, liberty, literally anything it wants to justify these actions again in the future for any reason.
I know there are many evils in this world, some you may think are far greater - poverty, hunger, abortion, terrorism, war, disease, racism, sexism, rape culture, inequality, totalitarianism, reality tv, whatever - yes, these are all terrible things.
But this, right here and right now, is happening, is ongoing, is being done in your name and with your money, by your countrymen under your flag, and it is stoppable. So please, for a moment, quiet your rhetoric, put down your protest signs.
Turn off the cable news, dismiss the lies coming from the president, ignore his pathetic Congressional do nothing appeasers. We must, for the future of this country, for our own humanity, and for the damaged, fearful lives of these people, these children...
we must stand up now and say no. Not now, not ever. Not in my name, nor any other’s. No.
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