Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/the-law/page/18/)
I do not doubt our need for the rule of law in a world of injustice and twisted desire. We need good laws, and we need to obey them. But the conversation in Washington about “immigration reform” assumes that something is wrong with immigration law as it stands. The problem, in short, is that we have a law that makes the existence of 11 million people illegal.
In any case, even though Obama took small pains to assure us all that he wants to close the Guantánamo facility, the truth is that in January 2013 the Obama administration closed the office in the U.S. State Department in which officials were working to repatriate or resettle the great majority of the remaining Guantánamo prisoners — almost all of whom have been found innocent of any wrongdoing. The truth is that according to the executive options in the National Defense Authorization Act, Obama could have initiated the release of the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo years ago.
Daryl Atkinson isn’t just quoting statistics when he talks about America’s most overlooked domestic crisis–mass incarceration as a result of the War on Drugs. 2.3 million people in prison, nearly 7 million in our criminal justice system. The United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other nation in the world. Since the early 1980′s, when our War on Drugs was declared, incarceration rates have increased by nearly 800%. The result: 65 million Americans–most of them people of color–have been relegated to a criminal caste that is denied access to employment, federal housing, and financial assistance for education.
O God, remind us that we are part of a whole, part of the land or our ancestry and your future, that we are both bordered people and unbordered, national and trans-national, wound and unwound people. Let us be citizens of a globe, where love and respect have just borders. Amen.
That struggle for racial justice is often held up as an example of how change is possible. And its stories have helped teach many movements of nonviolent resistance, in countries ranging from the Philippines to Poland to South Africa. But how was change possible at that time? These days the lack of progress in our politics is a given, and it is usually chalked up to fierce polarization, chiefly between Democrats and Republicans. As today, the national politics of 1963 (certainly on the domestic front) was deeply fractured along ideological lines between liberals and conservatives if not strictly between Democrats and Republicans. Still, change happened – and on the most flammable question, race.
Many college students today feel themselves to be under immense pressure to secure their own professional futures—to be able to repay loans and to avoid falling on the wrong side of the deepening economic divide. Others want to acquire money and comfort, or power, because this is how a successful life has generally been portrayed to them. But many also have a concern with community and social problems and have experience doing various kinds of volunteer work; others are interested in politics and public service.
Some people will no doubt see the president’s gesture as political pragmatism rather than a spiritual act of forgiveness. I say the two are not mutually exclusive. Republicans also ought to employ both political pragmatism and the spirituality that they claim in making political decisions.
Anyone who has failed to note the complete capitulation of American progressives to the Obama line should consider the dramatic contrast posed today on the question of the president’s “right” to assassinate American citizens.
On Monday of this week, the police chief of Montgomery, Alabama, formally apologized to Georgia Congressman John Lewis, for what the police did not do in May 1961 – protect Lewis and the other young Freedom Riders who arrived at the city’s Greyhound Bus station and were summarily beaten by a white mob. The day before the ceremony (the first time anyone had ever apologized to him for that particular thrashing, the congressman noted), Lewis, Vice President Joe Biden and 5,000 others joined in an annual reenactment of the 50-mile March from Selma, which led to passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. On that occasion 48 years ago, state troopers took a less passive approach and brutalized Lewis and others themselves. A few days before the reenactment, President Obama unveiled a statue of Rosa Parks that will stand permanently in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, making her the first African American women to be so honored. One name that doesn’t figure notably in these various commemorations is that of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
I swore I was not going to write about the gun debate that has followed the latest mass murder. It seemed an exercise in futility. Trying to convince people that they are wrong on gun control is like trying to influence their views on abortion. Attitudes and opinions are fixed on the issue. There is little chance that one more opinion will change them. Recently, the conversation took an interesting turn, one that is new to the ongoing debate on gun control. The idea that we have to have personal weapons to fight our own government went from being a fringe idea to a mainstream argument, defended by conservatives and many pro-second amendment liberals.