{"id":24089,"date":"2019-06-20T12:16:51","date_gmt":"2019-06-20T19:16:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=24089"},"modified":"2019-06-20T12:18:23","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T19:18:23","slug":"thursday-bag-o-shame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=24089","title":{"rendered":"Thursday Walk o’ Shame"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"walk<\/a>Oh my, one of my fellow docents stepped it in. Again. From an email sent yesterday to Pima Air and Space Museum<\/a> volunteers:<\/p>\n

“Over the weekend an incident happened at the museum concerning a breastfeeding mother in public. We are sharing this information to keep you informed. … It is against the law to ask a mother to cover up or move elsewhere to breastfeed. If another guest is uncomfortable with the mother breastfeeding in public and would like to make a formal complaint, please refer them to guest services in Admissions.”<\/p>\n

And here I thought talking about Trump’s redesign of Air Force One livery in front of museum visitors was fraught with peril. Oh, wait\u00a0… talking about Trump in front of museum visitors\u00a0is<\/em> fraught with peril. Seeing a mother breastfeeding her baby and minding her own business isn’t perilous at all, unless your head’s so far up your ass you decide to make it your business. I can’t believe a fellow docent\u00a0could be so\u00a0patriarchally arrogant, so ignorant of the law, as to\u00a0pull a High Sparrow on a breastfeeding mother and try to force her to do the Walk of Shame, let alone that he would think she was doing anything wrong in the first place!<\/p>\n

On second thought, given the “heartland values” of some of my museum colleagues, yes I can. I can probably name at least a dozen who’d have done exactly what this docent did. No, I don’t know who it was, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was the\u00a0same tram docent who\u00a0saw a visiting Orthodox Jewish family in traditional attire and rushed into the volunteer\u00a0break room to\u00a0warn the rest of us the Mormons were out in force that day, or the\u00a0volunteer\u00a0who\u00a0warmed up the audience for my F-15 Eagle presentation with a\u00a0sexist joke.<\/p>\n

Somebody shoot me if I get that way.<\/p>\n

p.s. Donna breastfed our firstborn in the mid-1960s. Mostly at home, but occasionally in public, as all breastfeeding mothers must. I don’t remember anyone ever making a big deal over it.<\/p>\n

\n

For years now I’ve said that any\u00a0attempt to round up and deport undocumented aliens living in the USA would come down to cattle cars and concentration camps. Earlier this week, Trump announced<\/a> that Immigration & Customs Enforcement agents\u00a0will begin removing millions of immigrants<\/a> who are in the United States illegally, and start doing so next week\u00a0…\u00a0three days from today. This is exactly the scenario I’ve always feared a\u00a0racist administration\u00a0would try to pull off.<\/p>\n

We haven’t started loading people onto actual cattle cars yet (so far it’s been Border Patrol buses), but a network of concentration camps<\/a>\u00a0is already in place, with plans to open even more<\/a>. Yes, calling facilities where we\u00a0hold tens of thousands of civilians without trial “concentration camps” invites comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, but that’s what they are. Right now we’re using the camps to hold would-be immigrants caught coming over the border. If Trump gets his way, before the end of the month there’ll be even more camps, this time to hold millions of people who’ve been living in the USA\u2014many for years, generations even\u2014pending their deportation by force.<\/p>\n

There aren’t enough Border Patrol buses in the world to haul away the numbers of people Trump’s talking about. You’re goddamn right, we’ll use cattle cars. Considering the widely-reported\u00a0conditions inside existing detention facilities<\/a>, I suspect\u00a0our cattle cars won’t be any nicer than the ones the Nazis used:\u00a0bare floors and walls, no food, no water, no toilets, people jammed in shoulder-to-shoulder.<\/p>\n

Yesterday a liberal MSNBC pundit, Chris Hayes, joined the debate over whether or not to invoke the Holocaust by\u00a0using the phrase\u00a0“concentration camps.” Here’s the waffle he posted<\/a>\u00a0on Twitter:<\/p>\n

“Last comment on this: ‘concentration camp’ is an extremely charged term and I get why many people are, in good faith, uncomfortable with its application for Godwin’s Law purposes among others. So let’s just call them ‘detention camps’ and focus on what’s happening in them.”<\/p>\n

To which no less a person than Mike Godwin*, the very man himself, had this to say<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“Chris, I think they’re concentration camps. Keep in mind that one of their functions *by design* is to punish those individuals and families who are detained. So even the ‘charged’ term is appropriate.”<\/p>\n

So what happens now? Are we going to sit around and\u00a0let it happen? It’s sure starting to look that way. The longer Trump and his deplorables dominate the national debate, the more\u00a0it becomes clear that just as in Germany in the 1930s and 40s,\u00a0a third of\u00a0Americans would happily see another third rounded up and removed\u00a0… while the other third watches.<\/p>\n

*Godwin’s Law<\/a>:\u00a0“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving\u00a0Nazis\u00a0or\u00a0Hitler\u00a0approaches 1.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For years now I’ve said that any attempt to round up and deport undocumented aliens living in the USA would come down to cattle cars and concentration camps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[250,10,2761],"tags":[2733,2448,2795,2798,2797,2024,2796],"class_list":["post-24089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-wars","category-current-events","category-yell-clouds","tag-didisayfucktrump","tag-fucktrump","tag-breastfeeding","tag-cattlecars","tag-concentrationcamps","tag-trump","tag-walkofshame"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24089"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24101,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24089\/revisions\/24101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}