The easiest comeback in our current political lingo is to call
someone or a group, Nazis, I don’t think I need to much more detail. Recently,
Senator Ocasio-Cortez referred to the Customs and Border Patrol camps at the
U.S. – Mexican border as Concentration Camps. While the dictionary definition may
simply be a place where a large amount of people are concentrated in a single
area, it’s the historical definition that matters here, that these camps are
being equated to the Nazi death camps operated by the SS during World War 2.
Not only is calling your opponent a “Nazi” an easy insult,
it’s also the easiest way to widen the political divide. In order to solve
these issues, we need to be willing to come together and access the problem
with clear minds. Taking self-righteous stands does nothing but perpetuate the
“us vs them” mentality and listening becomes ancient history. Very little will
be accomplished with this, political rhetoric gets harsher and Congress will
suffer nothing but gridlock as the blame game becomes the norm over debates.
The statement from the Holocaust Memorial Museum (linked
below) provides an exceptionally good reason why these analogies are not
healthy for our already polarized society. And while I do respect Sen. Ocasio-Cortez’s
efforts to rectify the horrible situation at the border, she might find herself
with more enemies than allies. Rhetoric that is self-righteous and tries to
shame the other side does little more than harden their resolve.
The situation with our southern goes back as far as I can
remember, and I started following politics under Pres. George W. Bush’s
administration. The continuous banter has resulted with little to no change at
all. How a subject so simple as policing our own border had become such
divisive and even a racially driven topic is beyond me. If we could affirm that
illegal immigration is “illegal” and that immigration is the life blood of the
United States, we could move on to streamlining of immigration system. Instead
it remains an underfunded bureaucratic nightmare simply remain a political
talking point that will never be fixed.
I’ll conclude here with a quick explanation on the concept
of his “Historical Perspective”. It is this method in which we study history
without imposing the views of our time on events and people of the past, it
helps create context. And it is with that context we can take lessons from, so
that we understand people and events within their own timeframe and hopefully
not repeat the same mistakes. This is a concept that is often ignored, often
producing revisionist history (a subject for another time) and creating erroneous
comparisons.
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