Kudos and thanks to Rep. Vicente Gonzalez’s efforts to repatriate patriotic, deported veterans who gave of themselves in defense of this noble America.
Anybody who served this country patriotically and honorably, without criminal blemish of any kind, deserves a pathway to repatriation and any benefits they’re entitled to. Godspeed to them.
Imelda Coronado
Mission
Burying
the dead
Anyone familiar with deep history knows that it always comes down to exactly this in a democracy: a wealthy aristocracy with special privileges cordoning themselves off from everybody else and running the country however they want. Nations get tired of trying to build a democratic, classless society where equality and opportunity run rampant, where there is great upward mobility for city and country dwellers, immigrants and native residents alike.
That is what America worked to build during the first 200 years of our republic, the 1800s and 1900s. That whole scene took way too much education, faith, hard work, law, family, democratic principle, sit-ins, marches, demonstrations — you get the picture. Everything we don’t want, can’t do, or lack the will to pursue any longer.
Ours is the transition that happened in ancient democratic Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece and Rome; in medieval or pre-modern Venice, Switzerland, Germany and Holland; in highland tribes in Scotland and France; in low-land tribes in Africa, the Far East, ancient America, and other places across the earth.
Today, the entire country is just giving in to a much cleaner and easier division of humanity into aristocracy and commoners; gated-community wealthy vs. everybody else; one-tenth of 1%-ers and 99.9%-ers; people who bury their families in pyramids and people who bury their loved ones in six-foot holes.
One newspaper has memorialized this transition in the title for its commentary pages: The Post-Democracy Forum.
In this new world, there is no such thing as common sense, justice, mercy, good faith. There is only arbitrary rule by the very glamorous celebrity class who get whatever they want whenever they want, as everybody else gawks and worships.
That is what Republicans are demanding today and are on the verge of getting — special economic privileges like the landed Senatorial class of Rome had. Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump are demanding special political privileges like the right to absolute immunity from prosecution, just like the Stuart monarchs in England asserted in their demands for unlimited prerogative in leadership.
Ted Cruz doesn’t think twice about the hypocrisy of arguing for a limit of two terms for senators at the same time he is running for a third term himself. He realizes, even if the electorate doesn’t, that he is secretly pursuing and will likely get lifetime membership in an American-style titled nobility that he claims he doesn’t want.
Pass the beer and pizza, Momma, and keep the shovels ready for all the holes we will have to dig.
Kimball Shinkoskey
Woods Cross, Utah
