That the president doesn’t see that his ICE raids in Mississippi are separating families the same way his tactics at the southern border did is incredibly disturbing.  But it’s not surprising.  A zebra doesn’t change its stripes, nor a leopard its spots.  A Donald cannot change his pathological tendency to bring cruelty on other human beings.

We must not stop making a huge deal of this behavior.  We must not stop asking that our president and his lackeys take the time to look at a bigger picture each time the president decides to wreak havoc on a particular group of people.

The president said, in response to the cruelty of engendering absolute terror in the hearts of children and adults in Canton, MS, that his actions were meant as a deterrent for immigrants from southern countries.  Even though all evidence indicates that these acts of downright meanness do not deter immigration.

What the president has done is create, unnecessarily, an environment of terror in this town of 12,000 people.  It has driven too many Hispanic people behind the locked doors of their homes.  It has kept children from attending school.  It has deprived the local processing plants of labor, thus impacting the financial health of the city.  It has separated families, in many cases without cause, and deprived them of needed income while an individual is detained.

But what does the president care?

He doesn’t.

Did he take time to understand that in the bigger scheme of things, singling out this town and these poultry plant employees is just a drop in the bucket?  No.  He didn’t care that this act by ICE would do nothing more than incite terror.  That is all he really wanted to do in the first place.  (Do you see how acts like this qualify the president as a terrorist?)

Did he look for the root causes of undocumented labor?  No, he punished the workers instead of the employers who looked the other way for the almighty dollar.

At one time, residents of Canton, MS, expressed their displeasure that the poultry plants were employing immigrant labor, whether legal or not.  Canton, which is 85% African American, was informed that without Hispanic labor the plants would close.  Jobs were going unfilled because no one else wanted the jobs.  The complaining ended immediately and has not resumed.  Apparently, residents of Canton see the bigger picture.  The immigrants are not a threat.  They are an asset to the overall financial health of the city.

What other repercussions are there of this latest ill-advised act against Hispanics that we can’t know about?

Fewer than half of those arrested and detained (God knows where) have returned home.  Can they go back to work, or will their families now require government assistance to survive, whereas, while adults were working, they were earning their own way?

How many families will default on rent or mortgages or car payments while in custody?  And what will be the long-term effects where earnings have been interrupted?

How will delinquent rent affect the landlords?

How will the cessation of shopping by those families impact local commerce?

How will the overall health of the community be affected due to stress, anxiety and PTSD?  How many children will be left without biological parents to raise them?  How will social services be strained?  What will be the impact on schools whose funding is dependent on student counts if children stay at home on crucial days.

How can the administration not take any of these things into account?

And what questions haven’t even been asked yet that influence the big picture?

It truly baffles me.

Those immigrants who are here legally are suffering the anxieties related to fear that they will be mistakenly “taken away.”  They are developing a hatred of the white status quo, whom they cannot help but see as the enemy now.  As families are separated and deported willy-nilly, psychoses will develop and intensify.  The nation will see another disenfranchised group morph into a domestic hate group that could eventually turn to violence, much like what we are seeing happen with young, white men armed with assault weapons and dressed in military garb, seeking to retake a white nation that was never theirs in the first place.

We live in an era where negativity reigns.  America is punitive in nature toward all transgressions, regardless of their degree of “sin.”  America is inconsistent in applying its rules of justice.  It’s as if the United States has become a very inept parent, unable to praise or lift up its children equally, playing favorites with its light complexioned and well-to-do children, while treating the rest, the “others,” like bastard children.

Yet those in power cling to the delusion that they are acting in the interests of Christianity and God, as if the extreme punishments it seeks for “the lesser of these” is actually something a loving and compassionate God would approve.

How have we lost the grand lessons we learned as children of the 1950s and ’60s when we studied Your Weekly Reader to learn about and understand the world’s diverse cultures?  How have we lost the wonder of the exotic lives and cultures around the world, learned when we earned our Girl Scout badges for cultural exploration?  Where is that sense of pride when our high schools brought in foreign exchange students, whose friendships were highly sought for their intelligence and their uniqueness and their cosmopolitan world view?

None of this is going to end well if we don’t wake up and smell the coffee.

The United States of America sits on property that never belonged to white people.  White men decided that this continent needed to be wiped clean of indigenous peoples so that “civilized people” could expand their domain.

What has it gotten us?

Displaced Natives whose nations are scattered and identities all but erased.  Africans who were kidnapped from their homelands, forced to assimilate and lose their cultures, then punished for being here.  Immigrants – Irish, Italian, Jewish, eastern European — who believed the promise on the Statue of Liberty and came here for streets paved with gold, only to find them running with filth – the filth of human detritus and the filth of dark, white, human hearts full greed.

It is not going to end well, my fellow Americans, unless we learn to live outside ourselves, to put others before self, to live to relieve the suffering of others.

That is the immutable truth of God’s intentions for creation.

Otherwise, what is living for?