We live in a militarized police state. Los Angeles is occupied by National Guard troops and Marines, against the wishes of local authorities and the duly elected governor of California (whose personal ambition reduced him to a meme machine). President Trump reportedly will order thousands of National Guard troops to Chicago, against the wishes of the elected mayor and governor. Trump threatens to send the military to Baltimore because the governor of Maryland, an alumnus of the National Guard, is a political foe.
FBI agents raided the home of John Bolton, an obnoxious former Trump national security advisor who has criticized the president. The First Amendment used to protect the obnoxious from prosecution, but the Constitution is just an old yellow piece of paper used as a snot rag by the Supreme Court (which says that President Trump is beyond reproach). Vice President JD Vance said Bolton may have classified materials in his home — Trump’s bathroom was loaded with filched classified documents.
The Department of Justice has fired many agents and lawyers who were involved in hunting down and prosecuting insurrectionists who attacked the US Capitol and maimed police officers. Law and order for you but not for them. That’s what happens when freedom is relative.
A free press is under relentless attack — Iowa legislators who hate a free press and find an informed electorate inconvenient again are talking about killing public notice requirements, which will eliminate at least a third of the state’s newspapers. Prominent law firms have been cowed and co-opted to serve the president’s fetishes. Legal residents of the United States are arrested and held without hearing. Concentration camps are operating here and abroad — in Sudan and Uganda, of all places. Our father fought in Italy to defend freedom from fascists in World War II. Good thing he is dead and presumably cannot see this, because it is fascism in the here and now.
People brush it off as distractions. These are not distractions, they are by design implements of a totalitarian government. State universities in Iowa are sanctioning officials who dare speak out. Gays are targets. National news outlets are muzzled, and those that report the facts are derided as enemies of the people. Josef Stalin would approve. Local and state officials act with the sort of arrogance that George Orwell imagined. It is the stuff of imagination no more, it is reality.
We are not merely approaching an authoritarian state. We have reached the destination. Now that we are here, we step beyond the point of fear. You cannot know when the boot heel will drop on you, so you continue the steady march toward freedom. You hope they don’t haul you away.
We have been there before, at the Potomac, on the road to Richmond, over what was the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Marching to the step of freedom is an act of hope. We never can give up on hope. We must never give in. History will not forgive us.
Iowa’s four Roman Catholic bishops, including Bishop John Keehner of Sioux City, have been slow to the draw but tried to make up for it in a good Aug. 22 statement that calls on the flock to welcome the stranger and defend due process. “The security of a nation can never be used as an excuse to violate the dignity and human rights of migrants, including the right to due process by law,” they wrote.
The prelates were quiet for the longest time, as Donald Trump slandered immigrants as a class of criminals and based his campaign on the lie that they were wreaking havoc in our communities. Residents of Sioux City and Storm Lake know our new neighbors generally as hard-working meatpacking plant employees who have revitalized their communities and bring new life to St. Mary’s Parish and School. They voted for Trump anyway. If immigrants must be shipped to Uganda for a supposed tax break, so be it.
The Trump Administration has cast a pall of terror over poor people who simply are trying to provide for their families in difficult jobs that Anglos largely shun. They look to the church for strength.
“The Church’s response to immigration must go beyond platitudes; it must take concrete form in the way believers advocate, accompany, and serve others,” the bishops wrote in their letter to the faithful. “The treatment of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers is not a marginal issue but a gauge of how seriously we take the command to love our neighbor.”
Amen to that.
Yet the bishops state their “concern” and issue “caution” about the outrage of denying basic human rights. To wit: “Recent executive orders have heightened concerns about violations of justice and human dignity in immigration enforcement. Policies that restrict humanitarian protections, deny asylum claims, and expand detention measures disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, including families, children, and trafficking victims. The U.S. bishops have voiced particular concern about the open-ended deployment of military assets to enforce civil immigration laws, the prevention of access to asylum, and proposals that reinterpret birthright citizenship. With our brother bishops, we caution that these measures undermine the moral fabric of a nation built on principles of justice and human rights.”
We had better pray that St. Peter understands “concerns and cautions” in the face of grave sins against humanity. He should cut the bishops some slack based on this paragraph of exhortation:
“Every Catholic Christian has a moral responsibility to ensure that the personal dignity of migrants is upheld. This responsibility includes personal dispositions rooted in the truth of the Gospel and the attending call to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. To act in good faith means resisting narratives that dehumanize immigrants and instead recognize them as neighbors whom God allows to meet us on our life’s path. We must guard against political rhetoric that instills fear and division, that skews perceptions to justify violations of fundamental rights.”
That’s a good guide for all of us, Christian or not.
Preach, brothers. Then act. Jesus died over this kind of thing, crucified by the righteous and the fearful for a sack of coins.
Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Hull, would like to run for governor so he should be sensitive to one of the most compelling issues in Iowa, our deteriorating water quality. Feenstra has an opportunity to demonstrate his ardor for clean water by voting against the PERMIT (Promoting Efficient Review for Modern Infrastructure Today) Act which is pending in Congress and is expected for a vote after the Labor Day holiday.
The act would allow pesticides to be released into surface waters without a permit, allow the EPA and Army Corps Of Engineers to remove wetlands and streams from Clean Water Act protection, and bar states from protecting waterway from pipelines, among other things.
State and federal court rulings have rendered much of the Clean Water Act, passed in 1972, meaningless. The PERMIT Act would bury it.
Feenstra should be aware that a significant number of Republicans in Northwest Iowa, in particular, are leery of the government taking away their property rights in favor of pipelines. It is likely to be a central issue in a Republican gubernatorial primary.
He should vote against the PERMIT Act for his own political sake. Rural voters also are animated by legitimate worries over surface water pollution. The PERMIT Act is not necessary since courts already have held that federal agencies can ignore Clean Water Act provisions, at least in respect to wetlands. Voting against the PERMIT Act is not a vote against production agriculture, it is a vote against big corporations and big government eroding your property rights while actively endorsing water pollution.
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