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.

On Law and Freedom

“A government of laws, and not of men.”

       – John Adams, Novanglus Essays, No. 7.

This quote keeps coming to mind as I listen to the cacophony of voices objecting to the separation of minor children from parents at the border.  The rhetoric is for the most part directed at the President as the name calling cast his way becomes more and more horrific.    I understand that when people are shown a picture of a crying 2 year old allegedly about to be separated from her mother that there is something wrong with their hearts if they do not ache for the poor child.  But, that heartache does not mean that we should not enforce our country’s laws.

Let’s take a breath for a moment and consider the facts.  John Adams also wrote  “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, or inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” (Argument in Defense of the British Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials, Dec. 4, 1770).

So, what are some of the facts relevant to the separation of children from their parents?  First, we have immigration laws that prohibit illegal border crossings.    When adults illegally cross the border, they are placed in an adult detention center until it can be determined if they have a justifiable reason for entering the United States.  If not, they are returned to their side of the border.  If they have children with them those children are not placed in the adult detention center (would you really want that crying 2 year old or any other child placed in adult detention where a variety of criminals are also residing?).   Instead, those children are placed in a facility specifically designed for them.  No, it’s not home, but it has clean beds, activities, 3 square meals a day.  It is safe for a child until he or she can be reunited with his or her parents.   (We should also note that not all children placed in these centers crossed with their parents or other family members; some were unaccompanied minors and some were with adults unrelated to them who were crossing with the children for a variety of reasons, some very questionable at best).

It may seem cruel to separate these children from their parents, but this is simply a result of enforcing laws that are on the books.  No one complains when someone is placed in detention for breaking other laws and when so placed is separated from their child.  When someone breaks the law there are consequences and, when that someone has minor children then those children will likely suffer some of those consequences. 

And let’s also not forget that the parents of these children are knowingly committing an illegal act and choosing to bring their children into that illegal situation with all of its consequences.  These parents could choose to follow the legal immigration procedures and in so doing not subject their children to the possibility of separation from their parents.

Does this sound cold?  Perhaps so, but actually it is far fairer and more in line with our government and its freedoms than is an inconsistent enforcement of law.  For, when only some laws are enforced, then we become not a government of law, but of men.  And, when we let one or another decide which laws to enforce, or against whom those laws will be enforced, then we are turning over our power and our freedom.

This idea of the rule of law and its connection to freedom is not new.  John Locke wrote that freedom means being subject only to laws made by a legislative body that apply to everyone. (“The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power, but that established, by consent, in the commonwealth; nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact, according to the trust put in it” Second Treatise of Government, 1690). Aristotle wrote that “It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens.” (Politics, Book 3) The Oxford English Dictionary definition of “rule of law” includes “the principle whereby all members of a society are considered equally subject of publicly disclosed legal codes and procedures.”

John Adams first wrote the phrase “a government of laws and not men” in an essay published in the Boston Gazette in 1775.  In 1780 the Massachusetts Constitution used the phrase in the section outlining the separation of powers.   More recently, the term occurred in  the 1996 State of the Union Address  when President Clinton used the phrase in the context of immigration.  He spoke of his administrations “strong stand to stiffen the protection of our borders,” and then stated, “We should honor every legal immigrant here, working hard to become a new citizen. But we are also a nation of laws.”

We have a legislative branch of government which writes the laws.  The legislators are the duly elected representatives of the people of this country.  Once those laws are enacted we should be able to expect that they will all be enforced and enforced equally.  It is the job of the executive branch of our government to enforce those laws.  It is not up to the executive branch to decide which laws it will and which it will not enforce.  It we allow our executive to do that, then we are turning over our power to one person or group to rule us, perhaps at their whim, but even if done with what we see as compassion it is far more in line with an autocratic rather than democratic form of government.   It is this rule by a select or elite few and their ability to unfairly and arbitrarily apply rules that our founders hoped to protect us from as they created our Constitution and its separation of powers.   

So, next time you see the crying 2 year old, or hear the anti-Trump verbiage about his not stopping the separation of families at the border, remember that all he and the executive branch are doing is enforcing the laws – all of them.   They are doing their jobs.   It is not his or the executive branch’s place in our democratic republic to pick and choose which laws to enforce.  And really, is that a power that you would hand to any president?  That is, would you really rather have a government of men than of law?  A government where the ones in power could select what laws apply and to whom?

If you do not like a particular law, then demand that your legislators rewrite it.  Do not ask that it be ignored.  If the laws are subjectively enforced, then we no longer have a government of laws, but of a selective few who hold power at any given moment.  Wouldn’t you rather have a government in which the people, through their designated representatives in Congress, make the laws and then trust that the executive branch will enforce ALL those laws and apply them equally.    For that is what freedom is.   And that is why I stand behind the full enforcement of all the laws, even when it separates a mother from her child.