Imagine. Just when your father arrives at his job, say, at a meat plant or dairy farm, he’s surrounded by a squad of men dressed in black, wearing masks. He is arrested, like thousands of mostly non-Caucasian men and women, deported to places that look like, smell like concentration camps. Despicable, often inhumane prisons. He has been convicted of nothing.
Nazi Germany? No. It’s happening right now. Supposedly in our name. In our country, the United States of America. Home of the free and the brave!
Or…imagine a scientist whose years of research helped save lives throughout the world. She gets an email that says that she is being laid off. Immediately. Her work will not be funded by the government. Any more.
The man who said he would be a dictator “on day one” gave the order.
We don’t have to imagine all this. In fact, Jerry Harvey, a professor at George Washington University, wrote about such things 37 years ago. He compared it to Adolph Eichmann ordering millions of people to be deported to concentration camps--in Nazi Germany. But Eichmann could not do it alone. He had the power to make other people do it. They followed orders willingly.
But how could they do that? We wonder. We surely wouldn’t.
We are told today that we need to get rid of tens of thousands of federal workers and contractors so they can be replaced by people who are loyal to…Eichmann. No. I mean Trump. Or Steven Miller. Or Elon Musk
Does all this sound okay to you?
Not to me. Where are our representatives who know this is wrong? What will it take for them to act like they know?
I’m Rick Brooks and that’s my perspective.
