Semantic Detention

     I’ve been reading a lot on how enthusiastic this administration is about putting children in detention (concentration) centers (camps), and I’ve got to tell you, friends and neighbors, it’s given me a few ideas. I know a lot of people are pretty irate about it, and I think I’ve figured out why. See, most of what I’m picking up these days is that one side is angry that we’ve got a bunch of children being imprisoned, seemingly for no other reason than that they’re not from here. Which seems like a good thing to be mad about.
     Over on the other side, there’s a mess of folks who have been convinced that people get detained because they’re a threat. If a person is deemed a threat to the country, it makes sense to lock them up. Which is difficult to argue with.
     As usual, I can see the real problem, which really just boils down to semantics. We just need to define what a ‘threat’ is, and then we can start using these centers (camps) like we ought to. For example, we could call someone a threat who acts on the belief that other people’s children are unimportant, but their own children should be world runners despite having no qualifications. This is a person who willingly endangers the lives and wellbeing of others, specifically the weak whom Jesus was so fond of, and that seems pretty threatening to me.
     Scared and hungry children who have been dragged hundreds or thousands of miles, fleeing their homes and the danger there, are not generally threatening. Until they get thrown in a cage and mistreated for a few years and learn how to hate.
     We could perhaps consider a threat those who harbor a belief that whatever race or religion or gender they affiliate themselves with is superior than others, and act on this belief in aggressive or violent ways. People who have somehow conflated the concepts of patriotism and xenophobia, and now believe that somehow being brown is the same as being Anti-America. Or those who find it offensive that others adhere to a different pronoun labeling system than what they themselves are used to. Personally, I would most like to see detained those who still recalcitrantly refuse to cease equating same sex marriage to beastiality. “First two men, what’s next, a duck?” indeed. Either way, I recommend these people stop bringing up beastiality so much, considering what a jackass their own spouse married.
     People who are forced to flee their homes and travel thousands of miles to America because we’ve been so loudly singing our own praises as the home of freedom and liberty that every corner of the world knows about it? They don’t worry me so much. They also make the best food.
     Oh, here’s a good one which I’m sure we can all agree on! How about these judges that are giving rapists super lenient sentences because the rapist is “from a good family”, or because actually punishing them might “affect their grades?” How about those guys (they are, of course, all guys) Can we all agree that if our wife/sister/mom/kid/anyone we know was raped, and after being found guilty, the rapist was set free, we’d be pretty willing to send the judge to be “detained?” Considering the popularity of those stories and videos of fathers taking revenge on behalf of their molested children, I’d say this is an easy sell.
     Whoever we decide we have to fill these camps with - and yes we do have to, this is America and we support our private industries-, we have to get these kids out of there. Sure it’s bad for our image, sure the companies who run them could probably charge more for rich white men who demand better treatment, sure the rest of us would be a lot happier, but really, most importantly:
     These are children.
     Who are in concentration camps.
     And nothing about that is right.
-John