Where is the shame?

Ihave watched with horror and disbelief as my beloved country rapidly becomes unrecognizable. Local, state and federal officials are behaving in ways that I believed we would never see again in the United States.

“Again,” because this is sadly not new. In relatively recent memory is the shameful episode during World War II when we sent thousands of loyal United States citizens of Japanese descent to internment camps. Further back in our history is the horrific slavery era, which some current Americans unbelievably refer to as “the good times.” More recently, many of us have personal memories of the atrocities perpetrated during the Jim Crow period lasting well into the 1960s in some parts of our country.

Now we have the shameful spectacle of families fleeing from their own countries to America’s borders in the hope of avoiding starvation, rape, violence or even death from gangs or political unrest, and having children summarily and, in some cases, violently separated from their parents with little or no hope of being reunited in any reasonable time frame or ever.

Under extreme public pressure, the Trump administration has stopped the family separation policy, but we all know it’ll be back again with the slightest provocation. There is so much more “bad stuff ” happening, such as the growing, federally funded war on women, the imposition of personal religious beliefs on others, the refusal to accept scientific facts as such and the watering down of real education in the name of political correctness.

A driving factor of all this is the clearly criminal, totally dishonest “gang” in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere that is “running” the country with the sheep-like approval of many, if not most of our elected officials.

Where is the shame? Is this really the country that we want to hand down to our children?

I hold all the current batch of politicians, Democrats and Republicans, responsible for the current deteriorating situation; the Republicans most of all, for actually voting for this “clown car” in the White House and Democrats for standing by and not standing up against them.

The Trump voters must also take some responsibility. Those of us who knew of Trump from his crooked dealing in real estate, noneducation and other dubious enterprises, were not surprised by his actions when he entered the White House. What surprised us then and still does now was that those Trump deplorables (Hillary was right!) didn’t seem to either be surprised by Trump’s antics or be upset by his criminal behavior.

What has happened in our education system and in our news media that has allowed so many otherwise decent Americans to believe that our current government’s behavior is not only normal but beneficial to our country? The growing real danger is that if we, the citizens of the United States, continue to stand by and do nothing, the corrupt and incompetent politicians and their flunkies now in charge will interpret our silence as implicit support for their behavior. This will further encourage these criminals-in-charge to implement even more cruel, vindictive and nondemocratic measures until we all no longer recognize our beloved country. This is how it started in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and by the time the German people realized what was happening, it was far too late.

So I ask again, where is the shame, where is the outrage, and when is this national nightmare going to end? Soon I hope; otherwise I really fear the worst may well come to fruition and our grand experiment in democracy will end in ignominy and an authoritarian oligarchy.

Is this really the country that we want to hand down to our children?