Left of the Dial

perfectly imbalanced

It's something they never tell you ahead of time. Or maybe they do and you just can't really understand it until you experience it for yourself. How sometimes you'll be looking at your kids and your heart will physically hurt from how much you love them, how lucky you feel you are, how undeserving. 

And then other times they'll do or say something—or many somethings—and you think, yeah, that guy had a point. 

"Suffer the children," not "make the children suffer"

Warning: I'm about to Godwin like you cannot believe.

My good lady wife is rocking a thorough and well-documented discussion of the atrocities being committed in our names over here, and I highly recommend checking it out. But one thing that should be always kept in mind when thinking about this situation, whichever side you're on, is her first bullet point: 

1. Seeking asylum is LEGAL.

So all those facile memes you've seen about "of course we separate children from their criminal parents!" are simply wrong. 

And ask yourself this: what would you think of these asylum seekers if they didn't try to get their children to safety? Is that how you'd roll if the lives of those you loved most were in serious danger? You'd just stay put? Or would you do everything in your power to keep your children alive? So why on earth would you look down upon others for doing the exact same thing you would do? For trying to be good parents? 

Which is to say that, putting aside #1 for a moment:

I mean, we all grew up knowing that, didn't we? We all grew up learning about Anne Frank and the heroic Dutch family who broke the law in trying to keep her alive. 

And yet, while that's all true, it's also not entirely germane, since—again:

1. Seeking asylum is LEGAL.

Okay.

So I read this powerful and concise explanation of where we are and why. It's very much worth clicking through and reading the entire (relatively brief) thing, but here's the nutshell: 

The suffering of these children isn't a byproduct, it's the point.

Or as has been said in other, much more benign contexts—since almost all other contexts are more benign—it's a feature, not a bug. 

This was a solution in search of a problem. Illegal immigration has gone down since 2009. The president himself crowed about that just over a year ago. So this isn't some crisis of hordes of people pouring over the border. Things are less drastic than they were years ago and, frankly, as someone who lived there at the time, it wasn't that huge a deal then, either. (For those of us not trying to cross deadly deserts, that is.) It was certainly nothing like the crime-ridden hellscape a certain network would have had you believe. 

Then I read this comment: 

The scariest moment I can recall from when I was young was losing my parents on vacation. I was probably 4 years old and got distracted by something. When I turned to where I thought my parents were, they weren't there. I was looking around frantically, surrounded by people, just overwhelmed with terror. There wasn't really thought, just panic. Fortunately I saw them, ran over to them and at that point I probably began to cry.

I was probably lost for 30 seconds. We were in Disney World, the "happiest place on earth". Looking back on it, it really doesn't seem like that big of a deal. And yet out of everything from when I was little, that's probably the most scared I've ever been. To intentionally force that feeling on others is absolutely horrifying to me. For these kids to suffer and endure everything they've been through to get to the US, without any real understanding of why, to then be taken from the only thing that they actually know, there's just no way this should be allowed to happen. The fact that anyone feels the need to argue where to assign blame for it happening instead of doing everything they can to stop it immediately is deplorable. Stop terrorizing helpless children.

and I realized I had a few memories like that myself. Even less dramatic but, yeah, I remember being four or five and lost for just a few seconds and how utterly terrifying and traumatic it was. And I can't remember what I had for breakfast the day before yesterday but I vividly remember spinning and spinning around at my brother's soccer game, trying desperately to catch a glimpse of my mother. And that lasted a few seconds, not days, not weeks, not maybe forever. 

And we have people in this administration—the president, his (literal) Nazi-sympathizing advisor Stephen Miller, his Department of Homeland Security's asylum chief—who planned this horrific scenario over a year ago. This isn't an accident. This is what they wanted. They actively wanted to terrorize children. They planned to terrorize children. 

The Trump Administration are literal terrorists. They are deliberately terrorizing innocent civilians in order to achieve their political goals. That is the very definition of terrorist.

I find it hard to believe that almost any of them don't have a similar memory of being separated when they were young. Or, even worse, that gut-wrenching, horrific feeling of not being able to find your own child. Maybe it was in a grocery store for a few seconds, or at a park, or a mall, or the beach, or in the house. It's terrifying and it gives any parent nightmares for the rest of their lives. 

And yet this is actively what they decided to do. They planned this for over a year. They want to terrify children. That was the idea from the very beginning. 

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome

But...how is that possible? How is it possible someone like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who herself has children, can not only stand by and let this happen, but actively aids and abets this horror show? How can she help terrorize children? 

Because, of course, those terrified children are not fully human. 

These theoretically pro-life advocates do not see these helpless, terrified babies as fully human. 

It's the only explanation I can come up with. It's the only thing that makes sense. The people in this administration and their supporters do not see—for obvious reasons—these poor screaming, terrified, traumatized children as fully human. 

Again: Donald Trump does not see these terrified, innocent little children as human. 

And we all know how that turned out last time. 

I'd like to remind you all of the president defending the white nationalist/neo-Nazis just a year ago. Those of us who paid attention during the campaign—or who had paid attention to him for decades—warned about his clear racism. We were ignored or told we were overreacting. But this is who he is. And as the great Maya Angelou once said,

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." 

This is who Donald Trump is. One of his closest advisors is a white nationalist. He himself has a long history of racism. He has spoken of Hispanic and Latino immigrants in dehumanizing terms. And now he has ordered babies to be treated in utterly inhumane ways. 

Let's repeat that again: he has ordered babies to be treated in utterly inhumane ways. 

This is not a coincidence. This is not an accident. This is who he is. 

It is not a legal requirement. This was a choice. This was his preference. This was his desire. 

Donald Trump and his administration wanted to treat babies in a cruel and inhumane manner. 

So. That leads to the obvious next question:

Who are you? Because whether you continue to support him and his party—and that's key, since if you support his party, which has written him a blank check for a year and a half now, you are supporting him, whether you like it or not, whether you care to admit it, even to yourself, or not—will determine that. 

Are you one of the good Germans? Are you going to pretend you didn't know? Are you going to tell yourself that torturing babies is okay because of tax breaks? Or abortion? Or her emails? 

Are you?  

Hoods

The two middle girls return from a long walk. “There’s someone outside who wants to speak with you,” the older one says.

I go out and see a woman standing there. “Hi,” she says. “Your girls were standing at the intersection over there, and they threw something at my car. It hit my window. There’s no damage but I thought you should know.”

I thank her and ask her to wait a moment. I pop back into the house. The girls are standing side by side, perfectly still, on the other side of the room. “Is this true?” I ask.

“Yes,” they both say.

I point towards the door. “Let’s go.”

Without waiting for further instructions, they go outside and apologize quite nicely, the 13-year-old stoic, the 11-year-old’s voice shaking. The woman accepts their apology and tells them they shouldn’t do things like that. I apologize to her again and thank her for being understanding.

I go inside and even though it’s the middle of the afternoon, I send both girls to bed, and tell them they’re not allowed to read or talk, that they just have to lay there. Without a word, they hang up their jackets and go.

I wait nearly an hour before I go in. “I am so sorry, Daddy,” the younger one says, trying and failing not to sob. The older one sits up straight, as though at her arraignment, and says, “It was my idea and I take complete and total responsibility.”

I hold up my hand. “What did you throw?” I ask.

“These little berries that were on the ground.”

I nod grimly, although inside I’m very relieved. That’s it? Just berries?

“Was that the first car you’d thrown them at?”

“No. Just the first one we hit.”

Inside I resolve to step up the number of catches we have in the backyard.

“Why did you do it? What were you thinking?”

The younger one opens her mouth to try to explain but no words will come. She just shakes her head.

The teenager also shakes her head as she says, “It just…it just seemed like a good idea at the time.”

I nod as I stand up. “I’ll be back.”

I wait another hour before returning. The 11-year-old is clearly tormented by her actions and would do just about anything to go back in time and change the past.

I sit down and say, “When your oldest and best uncle was about, I dunno, 12? He and a bunch of the neighborhood kids were playing at someone’s house on the next block. Like a lot of the houses in the New England area we grew up in, it had a gravel driveway. For some reason your uncle and some of the other boys grabbed a handful of rocks and threw them at a passing car. The car screeched to a halt. All the other kids instantly ran away, but not your uncle. He just stood there and waited for the driver. The driver made him give his name and address and then he came and talked to Grandma and Granddad. Your uncle apologized and, as I recall, was given a pretty hefty punishment. But the driver, despite being unhappy about having pebbles thrown at his car, was impressed that your uncle had stood his ground and admitted culpability, and he told your grandparents that. Grandma and Granddad, although probably not admitting it at the time, were impressed too.”

I look at them, and motion for the younger to come sit on my lap. “You guys made a mistake, a big one. But you admitted it and you apologized even without being told to. And I’m guessing you’ve learned from this and won’t be doing it again?”

The older nods seriously while the younger buries her face in my chest as she tries to stop crying.

I tell them they can have dinner in a little while, but that’s it. The rest of the evening and night they’re just going to stay in their beds without talking. And in the morning everything’ll reset.

And I leave and I stop in the hall and I look at what they’d been wearing, the hoodies they’d been wearing, now hung up neatly in the closet.

I think about what might have happened if things had just been a little, and not really all that much different. If they’d been boys instead of girls. If they’d been just a few years older, each. If the hoodies had been grey and black instead of pink and cream. If we’d lived in Florida instead of California. Most of all, of course, I think about what might have happened if they’d had dark skin and hair rather than pale skin and blonde hair. I think about how this is what kids do, they do stupid things—and this dumb little thing they did, throwing something at a passing car, is literally one of the dumbest things they’ve ever done in their entire lives and it wouldn’t have even made the Top 20 dumb things I’d done by their age, not even close.

And if those series of facts, virtually none of which they had anything to do with but which were just the luck of the draw, were each just a tiny bit different, they could very well be lying in the morgue right now and their killer free forever—because, after all, throwing something at a car is without question far more threatening an act than walking down the street with a bag of Skittles. And I think about how insanely lucky I am and how it’s just not fair. 

 

Gitmo Debate Simplified

Concise yet incisive:

Manufacturing Guilt

I very much doubt and—even more—hope you'll not read a more disturbing news story this year. 

I am vehemently opposed to the death penalty. But I'm not sure I'd fight it were it handed down to a few of the people inexplicably walking around free in this case. 

For most of the last 20 years, doctors Steven Hayne and Michael West have served as expert forensic witnesses for the state of Mississippi. Until 2008, Hayne served as the de facto state medical examiner, dominating a criminal autopsy market in which prosecutors contract out examinations to favored private doctors. West, a dentist, served one term as the elected coroner in Forest County, Mississippi in the 1990s and partly through his work with Hayne became a popular bite-mark examiner among prosecutors. Both men have come under intense scrutiny for questionable working procedures and dubious testimony—West off and on for 15 years, Hayne mostly in the last two.

Last year, two men that Hayne and West helped convict of murder in the early 1990s, Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, were exonerated and freed from prison through DNA testing afterserving more than 30 years combined behind bars. Both men had been accused of raping and murdering the daughters of their respective girlfriends. In what has come to be a pattern with the two doctors, in each case Hayne claimed to have found in an initial autopsy what other examiners missed: bite marks on the victim's body. He then called in West, a forensic odontologist (dental examiner), who definitively matched bite marks to the defendants. Partly because of the testimony from Hayne and West, Brooks was sentenced to life in prison, and Brewer to death (he spent 14 years on death row). DNA testing in 2008 determined that the semen found on both girls belonged to a third man, 51-year-old Albert Johnson. As Brooks and Brewer were freed, Johnson confessed to both crimes.

The Brooks and Brewer cases form their own forensics riddle: How could West and Hayne have definitively linked previously undetected bite marks on the victims to two men who didn't commit the murders?

Reason recently obtained shocking video from another Hayne and West collaboration that may shed light on the question. In 1993, the two conducted an examination on a 23-month-old girl named Haley Oliveaux of West Monroe, Louisiana, who had drowned in her bathtub. The video shows bite marks mysteriously appearing on the toddler's face during the time she was in the custody of Hayne and West. It then shows West repeatedly and methodically pressing and scraping a dental mold of a man's teeth on the dead girl's skin. Forensic scientists who have viewed the footage say the video reveals not only medical malpractice, but criminal evidence tampering.

How Hayne and West are not behind bars right now is beyond me. I assume it's because a significant number of the officers of the court knew or at least strongly suspected that they were crooked and kept employing them anyway, and it's simply too big a can of worms to open.

Too bad. Open it.