Stop Letting Them Use Your Emotions to Control You!

The issue of the day is immigration.  We see photos of a crying little girl.  We are told babies are being torn from their mothers’ breasts.  We are told children are being placed in “concentration camps.” Of course, these are selective assertions, some of which are blatantly false.   All of this is used to motivate anti-Trump sentiment while making people so emotional that they can’t, don’t want to, or refuse to objectively look at all the facts and, more importantly, to THINK for themselves. 

Regarding emotional facts and their use as propaganda, Psychology Today states:

Propaganda traffics mostly in emotions, and not just negative ones. Propagandists appeal to our fears but also to our courage, our hatred and our love. The fact that propaganda is at heart an emotional manipulation also does not mean that our emotions and "emotionality" are bad. It means that our emotional system can be manipulated to destructive ends.

The antidote to the process of propaganda is the process of finding factual truth. The best way we have for doing that is through scientific inquiry, which referees competing claims systematically based on evidence. The propagandist process subordinates the facts to an agenda, even at the price of distorting or ignoring the facts altogether.

(The Con of Propaganda by Noam Shpancer Ph.D., https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/201702/the-con-propaganda )

The current propaganda attack about immigration plays to your compassion.  That human compassion that so many are feeling about the children at the border is a noble emotion.  But, sadly, it is being used to manipulate and exploit that emotion in a very un-noble and political agenda.

In the current emotional propaganda on immigration and children, you are not shown the actual housing for the children or the many services that are provided for them there.  You are not given the facts and statistics of the immigration laws, the numbers of those attempting to cross our borders illegally without any attempt to follow our very generous legal immigration laws and procedures, you are not told the numbers of criminals attempting to cross our borders, the child trafficking that occurs across the border, the number of “catch and release” families that have been allowed into the U. S. and then never followed through with appropriate paper work to become legal and indeed disappeared without returning for court hearings.  You are not told that there has been an enormous increase in the numbers of adults trying to cross with children that they fraudulently claim as family members.  And, you are certainly not reminded that those who are separated from their children are those who have broken our laws and committed an illegal act.   These are all facts that are relevant to this issue, as is the simple fact that we are a country of laws, not men (see earlier blog post On Law and Freedom, http://ps.pinkspolitics.com/2018/06/on-law-and-freedom.html ). 

I encourage everyone who is being swayed by the propaganda offensive  to listen to today’s briefing by the Secretary of Homeland Security which gives a much fuller picture of the problems at the southern border as well as actual facts about separations of children from parents:  https://www.c-span.org/video/?447252-1/homeland-security-secretary-nielsen-calls-congress-fix-immigration-policy&vod

We have laws and we cannot let emotion alone negate those laws.   We cannot let our sound and good emotions be manipulated for political gain.   If we become a country of emotion, not law, then we are certainly well on our way to anarchy.  Children on a playground let emotions rule their behavior.  Adults may be guided by their underlying emotions and values, but they create rules and then follow them while demanding that they be enforced.   At least, that is what adults in this country used to do.

Our government, as it should, is simply enforcing the law.  Congress makes the laws.  People who, upon examination of all relevant facts, would like to see the laws changed, should contact their Congress people.  I think that most everyone would agree that we need to resolve and update our immigration laws.  But we have a process for doing that, and it is not done by manipulating emotions and demanding that laws simply not be enforced.

Do not let emotional photos and misleading or incomplete facts keep you from using your mind.  Yes, consider the heart-wrenching facts and your emotional responses, but also consider other emotional facts that are more likely to cause feelings of fear or anger than compassion (such as the number of criminals illegally crossing and then lost in our country or the parents who separate themselves from their children and send them across the border alone or with criminals.) 

Objectively consider these things along with the existing law and what is the role of law in our society.  Those reciting the emotional anti-administration narrative also demand that the President and the executive branch “pause” enforcement of the law out of compassion.  Consider what a slippery slope this would create:  if whenever we have compassion that in some way conflicts with the enforcement of a law we just suspend the law, we eventually could have very few laws being enforced and those that are being enforced would be enforced subjectively and unevenly.  Moreover, by allowing this emotional control one sets the stage for even more manipulative propaganda.  And, propaganda is rarely used for the benefit of others, but rather for the benefit and power of the propagandist.

Perhaps you want to be a part of the fight for open borders or simply to unseat President Trump.  You have every right to make the decision to take that stand.  I only hope that it is indeed your decision to do so based upon all the relevant facts and not simply a result of emotional propaganda.

Ask yourself whether this is the direction you truly choose, or if your compassionate heart and legitimate emotion about children is instead being used by those whose agenda has little to do with children or immigration and more to do with amassing foot-soldiers in a far more calculated political agenda?  An agenda which is ultimately intended to create and maintain the power of those who are tampering with your kind heart.