Suicide

For most of the life of this blog, I've been pointing to the ways in which Republican theocrats, teabagger know-nothing hate-everythings, and Foxobeckian RWS™ promoters are destroying any chance we have for a livable future. One aspect among very many is the rising tide against immigration: not just illegal immigration, about which there's surely a way to find agreement, but all immigration. To keep out the only group of people, I've said, that retain belief in and willingness to work for The American Dream is a form of slow suicide. Here's an article that puts flesh to the bones of the idea:

... I have heard from a senior scientist at a San Francisco Bay Area company, an award-winning engineer from the University of Texas who helped design Intel’s latest generation of memory chips, and a young woman whose entry into a Ph.D. program in chemical engineering was jeopardized by six months of bureaucratic delays—and many, many others. Taken together, they offer this troubling conclusion: the United States, a country built by generations of ambitious, hardworking newcomers, no longer wants to attract skilled immigrants. “We educate the best and brightest from around the world, and then we tell our companies that they can’t hire them,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said, describing current immigration policy as “a form of national suicide.” “We ship them home, where they can take what they learned here and use it to create companies and products that compete with ours. The rest of the world is thanking us. They’re doing everything they can to attract those very people—and we’re doing our best to help them.”...

Starting, perhaps, with 9/11, and accelerating with the election of a black man as president and allowing his family to live in the White House, we've become a nation that turned itself over to the phobes. Xenophobes, Islamophobes, homophobes, taxophobes. Factophobes. Sciencophobes. They've always been around, of course. But now they're taking over. And as they do, our hopes for a future are being diminished. In the context of this post, deported.

Actually, I suppose the correct term is assisted suicide. Or, maybe forced suicide. Suborned suicide. Because what's happening is overt deception, orchestrated by the ultra-powerful, abetted by their propaganda networks, convincing the nation to walk its own plank. How else to explain this? Regular people, deluded people, people convinced to vote against their own interest by those who stand to profit, electing representatives actively working to destroy an agency designed specifically to protect those electors from financial ruin. Again.

Closing our borders to the people we need from without. Closing our eyes to the damage being done from within. It's suicide, all right. And it's killing us.