The malevolent Trump advocates profiling. Would YOU like to be profiled? Would you want your children to be profiled? Would I want to be profiled because I may, for example, look Middle Eastern or wear a hijab, the head covering for some Muslim women.
If one could time travel back to the era of WWII, I aver Trump would himself be one to be profiled as he looks so German and his right wing views are so extreme. He, like the American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh of that time, may have cheered what was happening in Germany and like Trump does now wanted to keep America First. I think he could have been followed during that dangerous time. How would he have liked it? The state can profile anyone even one who has done nothing wrong.
Diversity is our strength. The danger, and our Founders knew it, is the power of the state to do nearly anything it wants no matter how intimidating or brutal and to do so on a whim albeit profiling someone if the state thinks that someone looks dangerous. The state has that power. Our Founders' goal in constructing our republic, I think, was to restrain the power of the state and to empower the individual with certain rights that put a check on the state as to what it can or cannot do to deem and detain someone who may be thought to dangerous or be guilty of a crime he may not have committed. The worry is for the state to be able to apprehend and do whatever it wants because it has the power to use force against those who may and most especially MAY NOT be guilty of anything simply because the state can.
The danger here is rounding up those who are guilty of no crime merely because they look like they could be or are of a race, religion and culture that is not accepted by the majority. Charging, punishing and jailing those who have committed no crime is the greatest fear. THAT is our challenge and that is what some groups face merely because they were born into a certain group that is different from the majority or which the majority does not approve. We must NOT empower the state to do this no matter how imperiled the time in which we live. We must obey those Constitutional civil liberties our Founders emblazoned into our national holy grail. These rights are accorded to each individual even when it is the most difficult to observe those rights.
One cannot help those ascribed statuses into which one was born and may give him great disadvantage because the majority can impugn to him or her apriori guilt with no evidence and therefore no proof. The first 10 Amendments to our Constitution or the Bill of Rights are our greatest strength. Let us not lose that as Franklin Roosevelt so brilliantly said in his First Inaugural Address because "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes ... ." Even Donald Trump deserves those rights. Profiling anyone even Donald Trump and even if another democratic nation does it should be verboten even in our dangerous time lest we lose the essence of who we are.
No comments:
Post a Comment