Border Thoughts

References: Thread by Molly Crabapple & Scenes From an American Tragedy: The Texas Border Crisis

I've been trying to follow what's happening at the border for a little over a month now and things only seem to be getting worse from associations with Holocaust imagery to deaths of children being blamed on the parents. Here's a small summary of what I've read and seen.

• Asylum seekers have numbers written on their arms.
• Ice boxes where families are kept in frigid conditions.
• Children separated from their parents.
• Unsanitary conditions & illness.
• A child dying a horrific and preventable death.
• Drugs being used on children.
• Snatching by ICE, including some of my own relatives.
• Protests in my hometown over the sheriff's station being converted into an ICE detention facility.
• Personally all of my family being investigated for possible ICE detention by police instead of them doing their job. They told us they looked at least 20 years back and listed everywhere we lived, cross-referenced names etc.
• Rapes happening in detention facilities.

The human rights abuses are staggering and they make me sick to read and think about but the most gutting thing I've seen recently is how much support these types of abuses are getting on social media sites and how more and more people are taking sides against even their own family members for this ideology.

Our current social media platforms are acting as propaganda machines and turning neighbor against neighbor. Lighting and fueling the flames of hatred where only before was vague insecurity.

Propaganda which takes information overload from social networks and news sites, reforms it into a cohesive easily understandable remedy. It's simple, make everything seem connected, draw lines where only there were random dots of information, regardless of their truth. Smother it in an ideological veil and focus in on your target. Then lead the masses, fan their hate, and see how far it goes. ...

I'm tired of seeing my family members fall for ideologies of hate and celebrate it like golden tiara upon their heads. Humming the German Waltz, Peppering their speech with German & Nazi terms, and telling me about the latest rage in Antisemitism. While the rest of my family and relatives are loosing people and making lists of dangerous places not to go without a group of three or more....

We know what happens next, we've seen it all before. ... We have the power to stop it and we need to before it's too late.