Donald, Bar the Door?

 As expected, feared or cheered, President Trump has signed an executive order imposing a four-month moratorium on refugees coming into the United States, with Syrian refugees in particular banned indefinitely. General entry from seven Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East is banned for 90 days until an enhanced screening program is put in place. The goal is to keep radical Islamic terrorists from entering and gaining a foothold here to carry out attacks.

Let me be clear: I do not have a problem with the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” or even enhancing the vetting process where needed. For Syrians in particular, however, the process was already daunting. Sadly, those in the final stages of this process now have the door slammed in their faces. And the discriminatory nature of the President’s order is right out there, as other Muslim nations in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are conveniently not on the “banned” list. Plus, an exception is to be made for Christian refugees.

I well understand that we can’t let in just everybody. But we never have. More often than not, we have discriminated. Many Jews fleeing the Nazis were not admitted during World War II, as an example. And it works in reverse: those with special skills considered necessary to our economy have always been welcomed. Adult male Irish immigrants who came during the Civil War were paid a nice bounty to join the Union Army almost as soon as they got off the boat. Lady Liberty may welcome the tired and poor, but is that what we really do?

As I have said many times, the U.S. and the West are almost complicit in the Syrian crisis. We shook our heads and said, “Ain’t that a shame?” when the Assad regime began murdering civilians using its own military. Even after President Obama’s infamous “red line” declaration when the regime was said to be using chemical weapons, we let Russia take charge – and take advantage of the situation to expand its influence. As wistful as many of us have been over the end of the Obama administration, our non-involvement in Syria remains a policy failure of cataclysmic proportions. The very existence of ISIS is a symptom.

Many of those who stand in crowds shouting “USA” and call for the building of walls conveniently forget that their American citizenship is a total accident of nature. Most of us just happened to be born here. We didn’t have to flee anything. Our ancestors were the ones who did the hard work. Not that living here is a picnic for everyone, but if we were born here, we all got free passes that we didn’t earn, and the oceans on either side of us have provided a convenient bubble for non-involvement in the rest of the world’s troubles.

What it boils down to, though, is that we each have to decide as Americans if President Trump is speaking for us with this executive order. He isn’t for me.

When Fail-Safe Fails

So how DID we get here, and where are we going now?

It’s almost impossible to absorb, in this age of instant communication and information abundance, that a confluence of events could have produced one of the most unpopular US presidents in 200 years. To me, it’s almost like what happens in a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. These facilities are fitted with layers of redundant fail-safe technologies to prevent such things from happening. But then, a collection of circumstances comes along which causes all of them to fail. We might call it an accident. But is it really? When we go back and review those circumstances, we find the culprit, or culprits.

The big one, in my view, is the whole system of elections. In the case of a presidential race, the process takes two years, and involves raising, and spending, billions of dollars. Because we allow every state to choose party nominees in their own ways, the rules are almost impossible to comprehend. Some have primaries, some have caucuses. In some the primaries are so-called beauty contests that don’t count, in others they do. In some, candidates have to win by congressional district. The process of even registering to vote varies by state. At the end of the process, after the national vote on the real Election Day, there is the Electoral College, which ensures that your vote and mine do not really count equally after all. Why do we tolerate this mess? A lot of it has to do with tradition. We’ve done it this way because it seems like we always have. Is that a good enough reason not to change it? Our Founding Fathers accepted the need for change. Even our sacred Constitution can be amended.

Of course, that’s not the whole story of what produced Donald Trump. What was the media’s role? It’s clear he got a disproportionate amount of attention. But did we have to have so many debates? And what about us media consumers? Was it just more reality TV for us, a different kind of American Idol? Come on, I saw some of you eating popcorn.

How did Hillary Clinton lose? Was it all down to FBI director James Comey? Was it the Russians? I wasn’t necessarily a Bernie Sanders fan, but the Democratic Party leadership did what it could to sabotage his campaign in favor of Hillary. The party got what it deserved.

Was it the elites versus the little guys? The 1 percent versus the 99? Immigrants versus native-born? Christians against Muslims? The coastals versus the flyovers? Or are many American voters just plain stupid? I submit that they are not. Most of us were blessed with a relatively equal number of brain cells. In too many cases, though, they go unused out of fear of letting in too much disruptive information. We have the technology to communicate, but we have clearly lost the art of it. And unless we find it again, there will be another Civil War, this time, a social one.

As to protests, I am all for them, but amassing a crowd, listening to speeches and wearing pink hats are only the beginning steps. There are a lot of things that need fixing now, and we have to save some energy for the long term, because many of the repairs are going to require courage, stamina, savvy – and open minds.