Hispanic Fanatic

I was unable to post last week, which always feels like a knife to the heart and a shot to the groin to me. Yeah, I don’t like missing a week.

Who is to blame for my lapsed work ethic? Well, it was those sneaky Canadians.

You see, I took a brief vacation to the Pacific Northwest, and while I was at it, I left the country for the first time in almost 20 years. My international destination was Vancouver. 

I was so busy hiking through the Canadian woods, conversing with ridiculously polite Canadians, and contemplating how much our northern neighbors love syrup (apparently, they like it a lot) that I couldn’t get to the computer.

Also, my laptop was 1,000 miles away, which is a whole other story.

So that’s my excuse.

However, I see now why so many liberals threaten to ditch America for Vancouver or Toronto. The country is beautiful, the people are friendly, and you can get just about everything there that you can get in the USA — plus even more varieties of syrup.

As one Canadian explained to me, the nation is a social democracy, which means that the government works for the people, rather than for major corporations. He then invited me to immigrate to his fair country if Trump wins the election in November.

With hope, it will not come to that. 

I do wonder, however, why so many Americans insist that we live in “the greatest nation in the world,” when that is clearly not true. I also wonder why progressives like me are pilloried for pointing out America’s shortcomings, while a certain megalomaniacal presidential candidate sees his approval rating go up every time he insists that the United States is a failing state.

Also, I wonder why so many conservatives insist that limited government is the best system, when in reality, social democracies like Canada are kicking our ass on just about every sociocultural indicator. These nations are the very antithesis of limited government, and their citizens are thriving. Related to that, if small government is so majestic, why is no other nation even remotely interested in trying it out?

I wanted to ask a Canadian about all this, but they were too busy being productive and happy and enjoying free healthcare and being polite to an absurd degree.

So I came back to America, where people chant “USA! USA!” from their trailer parks and drop dead of preventable conditions at age 39.

It’s enough to make me want to move to Vancouver.

It is, perhaps, the most pathetic attempt in a long line of pathetic attempts to distract from the president’s colossal failures and massive corruption.

I’m talking about the right wing’s frenzied, frantic endeavor to get you to focus on the tragic death of Mollie Tibbetts, a young white woman who was allegedly murdered by — and I bet this is the first you’re hearing about it — an undocumented Latino.

The grotesque individual who killed Tibbetts supplied the perfect imagery for the Republican Party, which wants“voters to believe they’re living in a horror movie” as part of their plan for avoiding disaster in the midterm elections. You see, “it is no accident that a president whose supporters are overwhelmingly white and less educated, who tend to live among other whites, are being targeted” and motivated to vote Republican based “on fears of the other and the unknown.”

I mean, what else are they going to run on? An unpopular president in legal jeopardy, a tax cut for billionaires, and a total lack of progress on health care, the opioid crisis, and the fabled wall with Mexico are not very compelling highlights.

So instead we have GOP leaders publicly admitting that they want to make Tibbetts’ murder a midterms issue.

And yes, this is the very same political party that insists any talk about gun control after a mass shooting is “politicizing” tragedy (by the way, there was another mass shooting just this week).

However, the opportunistic xenophobia of conservatives has disgusted Tibbetts’ family, which has called out the racist fear-mongering and callus exploitation of their agony. It has prompted at least one family member to tell right-wingers to “keep her name out of your mouth.”

But of course, Trump and his enablers are not going to allow little things like overt racism, blatant hypocrisy, and a devastated family’s loss get in the way of their political playbook. They fully intend to keep insisting that undocumented immigrants are killing their way across America.

Oddly, conservatives can write whole impassioned editorials about the Tibbetts murder without once mentioning, even in passing, the well-established fact that immigrants — including undocumented ones — are substantially less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

Also lost in the conservative outrage over Tibbetts’ death is the fact that the woman died because a man decided he had the right to take her — and take her life — without a moment’s hesitation. Acknowledging misogyny’s killer strain is not big with the Republican Party, which tends to appeal to men and female apologists for sexism.

However, “the truth is that any young woman like Mollie Tibbetts has a much greater chance of dying at the hands of a husband or boyfriendof any type than meeting harm at the hands of an undocumented immigrant.”

If you don’t believe me, just look at the week’s other big story about homicide. Apparently, some monstrosity in Colorado murdered his wife and two daughters — or triple the women that Tibbetts’ killer has confessed to.

But hey, at least that guy was a citizen, so I guess it’s no big deal, right?