[Note, text was written by Adam Bates, images were added by me.]
Original here:
https://www.facebook.com/adam.bates.9216/posts/10105542332088967
As it seems like Biden really is planning to repeal the Muslim Ban on Day 1, I just wanted to get a reflection/rant off my chest.
I feel like a lot of people have forgotten about the Muslim Ban. There was a spike of outrage at the beginning, when Trump and Miller intentionally sparked Islamophobic and racist chaos at dozens of airports, there was news coverage, there was litigation. But after the Supreme Court decided that the President can explicitly declare his desire to ban a religion from the United States and then do it without offending the Constitution, the average American just kinda stopped paying attention. It is not unusual for me to hear "oh, that's still in place?"
Yes, the "temporary, 90 day ban" is now on day 1,450. Millions upon millions of perfectly innocent people have been banned from this country for the last 4 years because the white nationalist president hates Muslims and Black and Brown people, and the GOP and the SCOTUS and 75 million Americans think that's fine.
It's weird for me to talk about so personally, because it doesn't affect me in any direct way. It's not my religion being officially scorned by the United States. It's not my family stranded somewhere because they don't call God by the same name the GOP wants them to. I don't have any skin in this game at all. I haven't had to live the last 4 years with the burdens and the trauma of this.
At the same time, if I can be self-centered (it's my page after all), my own life in my own head has a clear dividing line where the Muslim Ban landed. When the Muslim Ban happened I was perfectly happy in my job doing criminal justice/civil liberties work at Cato. The ban came down on a Friday afternoon, and went into effect immediately. There were people who took off on planes with valid visas and even green cards and by the time they landed in the US they were banned from America and turned around. Families were split up. People were sent back to war zones they had just fled. People who had sold everything and carried their entire lives with them were told they had no place here. It was an atrocity. And it was intentional. The chaos and the cruelty were and continue to be the point. That will forever be what the GOP means to me now.
My friend Abed A. Ayoub, who seems to never sleep or tire or do anything but fight for and help people every second of every day, asked if people could come over to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and help take phone calls. I told him I wasn't an immigration lawyer and didn't know anything about anything; he said if I can answer a phone then I'm welcome. So I went over to ADC after work and took calls. There wasn't a lot I could do, or that anyone could do really. Just listen to people's stories and take down their information and try to reassure them as best as we could. As best as we could while their wives or their grandmothers or their sons were being deported in front of them.
Long story short, I decided to quit my job at Cato to work on this stuff. And in the last 4 years I have been continually amazed and awed and inspired by the people fighting this ban every day. Especially the people who, unlike me, are taking on the burden of fighting this evil while being targeted and traumatized by it at the same time. People who go to work every day to fight against this injustice and then go home and live under it. Whether they're organizing people in the streets or showing up to agitate at airports or litigating or lobbying or just talking to their friends and family.
I've never felt such a fierce love for a community devoted to a cause. I could start naming my heroes but no matter how many I named it would be an insult to some I left off. I'll never be able to fully express my love for so many of these people and what they've accomplished.
Then I reflect on the evil that brought that group of people together in the first place, I think of the millions of man-hours, the time and energy and money and emotional effort that so many people have had to expend just to resist this one evil policy, and when I think on all the things these wonderful, brilliant people could have done with that time and energy if they hadn't had to spend the last 4 years fighting this, I just feel darkness.
And that's just talking about the organizers and advocates. The actual, human toll of what this bigotry has wrought is incalculable. We'll never know how many people were killed or tortured or ruined because America turned them away. We'll never have any idea how many lives were destroyed, how much human ingenuity and liberty and love were erased from the world because Donald Trump wanted to feel like a big shot and our institutions refused to stop him.
And *that's* just talking about one single, evil policy out of a whole mountain of evil policies targeting untold millions of people.
So it's understandable that people have kinda forgotten about this. America has an amazing capacity to put its own atrocities out of sight and out of mind. And this administration committed so many atrocities in such a short time that it would be impossible for anyone to give them all the attention they deserve.
But that's why I wanted to share this. Americans vote for this stuff, we pay for it with our taxes, we are complicit in it by our failure to stop it. We can make an effort to remember it too.
Original here:
https://www.facebook.com/adam.bates.9216/posts/10105542332088967
As it seems like Biden really is planning to repeal the Muslim Ban on Day 1, I just wanted to get a reflection/rant off my chest.
I feel like a lot of people have forgotten about the Muslim Ban. There was a spike of outrage at the beginning, when Trump and Miller intentionally sparked Islamophobic and racist chaos at dozens of airports, there was news coverage, there was litigation. But after the Supreme Court decided that the President can explicitly declare his desire to ban a religion from the United States and then do it without offending the Constitution, the average American just kinda stopped paying attention. It is not unusual for me to hear "oh, that's still in place?"
Yes, the "temporary, 90 day ban" is now on day 1,450. Millions upon millions of perfectly innocent people have been banned from this country for the last 4 years because the white nationalist president hates Muslims and Black and Brown people, and the GOP and the SCOTUS and 75 million Americans think that's fine.
It's weird for me to talk about so personally, because it doesn't affect me in any direct way. It's not my religion being officially scorned by the United States. It's not my family stranded somewhere because they don't call God by the same name the GOP wants them to. I don't have any skin in this game at all. I haven't had to live the last 4 years with the burdens and the trauma of this.
At the same time, if I can be self-centered (it's my page after all), my own life in my own head has a clear dividing line where the Muslim Ban landed. When the Muslim Ban happened I was perfectly happy in my job doing criminal justice/civil liberties work at Cato. The ban came down on a Friday afternoon, and went into effect immediately. There were people who took off on planes with valid visas and even green cards and by the time they landed in the US they were banned from America and turned around. Families were split up. People were sent back to war zones they had just fled. People who had sold everything and carried their entire lives with them were told they had no place here. It was an atrocity. And it was intentional. The chaos and the cruelty were and continue to be the point. That will forever be what the GOP means to me now.
My friend Abed A. Ayoub, who seems to never sleep or tire or do anything but fight for and help people every second of every day, asked if people could come over to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and help take phone calls. I told him I wasn't an immigration lawyer and didn't know anything about anything; he said if I can answer a phone then I'm welcome. So I went over to ADC after work and took calls. There wasn't a lot I could do, or that anyone could do really. Just listen to people's stories and take down their information and try to reassure them as best as we could. As best as we could while their wives or their grandmothers or their sons were being deported in front of them.
Long story short, I decided to quit my job at Cato to work on this stuff. And in the last 4 years I have been continually amazed and awed and inspired by the people fighting this ban every day. Especially the people who, unlike me, are taking on the burden of fighting this evil while being targeted and traumatized by it at the same time. People who go to work every day to fight against this injustice and then go home and live under it. Whether they're organizing people in the streets or showing up to agitate at airports or litigating or lobbying or just talking to their friends and family.
I've never felt such a fierce love for a community devoted to a cause. I could start naming my heroes but no matter how many I named it would be an insult to some I left off. I'll never be able to fully express my love for so many of these people and what they've accomplished.
Then I reflect on the evil that brought that group of people together in the first place, I think of the millions of man-hours, the time and energy and money and emotional effort that so many people have had to expend just to resist this one evil policy, and when I think on all the things these wonderful, brilliant people could have done with that time and energy if they hadn't had to spend the last 4 years fighting this, I just feel darkness.
And that's just talking about the organizers and advocates. The actual, human toll of what this bigotry has wrought is incalculable. We'll never know how many people were killed or tortured or ruined because America turned them away. We'll never have any idea how many lives were destroyed, how much human ingenuity and liberty and love were erased from the world because Donald Trump wanted to feel like a big shot and our institutions refused to stop him.
And *that's* just talking about one single, evil policy out of a whole mountain of evil policies targeting untold millions of people.
So it's understandable that people have kinda forgotten about this. America has an amazing capacity to put its own atrocities out of sight and out of mind. And this administration committed so many atrocities in such a short time that it would be impossible for anyone to give them all the attention they deserve.
But that's why I wanted to share this. Americans vote for this stuff, we pay for it with our taxes, we are complicit in it by our failure to stop it. We can make an effort to remember it too.