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(This is my most recent post on a thread on a Denver Post comment board, my participation beginning here: http://neighbors.denverpost.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=17865742&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=quote%3Dsteve+harvey&start=100. See Godwin’s Law Notwithstanding for the essay to which I am referring)windbourne wrote:Do you feel that he should apologize for locking up rapists as well? Perhaps murderers, or bank robbers as well?I already made a distinction between crimes of predation, and “crimes” that are an artifact of trying to legislate human migration. Border control is one thing; creating a permanent underclass within our borders by ignoring the reality of how our society forms itself is another.
windbourne wrote:Or he should apologize to those that have had their lives destroyed by the drugs that gangs from Latin America bring in?
And there we have it: Guilt by membership in a race or ethnicity. Since some Latin Americans join gangs and smuggle drugs, all Latin Americans share in the guilt, and are to be treated accordingly. I’m sure that you apply the same logic to whatever group you belong to, and consider yourself guilty of every crime any member of your own ethnicity or race ever committed, and thus believe that you should be treated accordingly as well. You have chosen to illustrate for us the dimension of the similarity that I did not emphasize, between the two historical contexts I compared in my essay.
If you respond by falling back on the illegality of their presence, then please explain what the relevance of the mention of the criminal activities of other Latin Americans has.
windbourne wrote:NONE of these illegals are suppose to be here. Many of them are DESTROYING American lives and livelihood. PURPOSELY.
Add in a hefty dose of hyperbole and paranoia, and the similarities become even more striking, almost down to the language used. You have a dehumanizing label that you apply (“these illegals”) which reduces human beings merely migrating toward opportunity to some subhuman status that you can then dismiss and revile. You can’t see it; you won’t see it. But others can and will, and America will wake up from the nightmare it is drifting toward. One of the tensions of human existence is the degree that we, as individuals and as socieities, yield to the basal ganglia of the human brain (“the reptilian brain”), rather than striving to be rational and compassionate human beings. That tension, and which of those two poles is dominant in what is being expressed on this thread, is clearly in evidence.
windbourne wrote:At what point will you show compassion for your fellow citizens that these illegals are harming??
What harm is produced is an artifact of pushing people into the shadows, and forcing them to find ways of surviving there. My compassion is for all, as the real rather than imaginary or manufactured need arises.
While I am writing for those lurkers who are not so completely lost to their hatreds and their bigotries, who recognize that we can be more or less cruel as individuals and as societies, and more or less reasonable, I also suspect that many of you who are most outraged by my posts are so outraged in part because you know, just beneath the surface of your awareness, that there is at least a grain of truth in what I am saying; that there is a disconcerting similarity between the attitudes expressed here toward our own undocumented population living among us and the infamous attitudes of Nazi Germans toward German Jews in the prelude to the Holocaust; that there is something unpleasantly familiar about the suggestion that these Latin American immigrants are somehow contaminating our otherwise pure society with the evils imputed to them as a race (as happend to the waves of Chinese, Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants before them, many of whom also came here without documentation); that there is something cruel and ugly about mocking the suffering of others you’ve managed to dehumanize (“waaahhhh, waaahhhh”).
I have no ill-will toward anyone here, though I do have a feeling of disgust at what is being expressed and demonstrated. But I am a hopeful person; I remember an interview of a woman several decades ago, who had been a teenager at the time the Little Rock Nine had been escorted into their new school, a cluster of Black students accompanied by National Guard troops surrounded by whites whose faces were contorted in hatred and rage. She was in the photo as a teenager, a white girl whose face was more contorted than all the others. And she said in this interview, in all sincerity, that she now knew that she had been wrong, just plain wrong. I have more respect for her, and for people like her, than for those who never had to grapple with those particular inner-demons, for she demonstrated the wisdom and courage of someone who could triumph over her own hatred.
We can and should discuss our immigration policies, and consider the balance of interests involved. We can and should weigh our real interests (not those that are based on arbitrary beliefs mobilized in service to blind bigotries, but rather those based on considering all analyses applied to all reliable data) against our commitment to humanity, and decide how to balance the two. But we do not have to contaminate that with hatred and indifference to the longings and strivings of other human beings; we don’t have to dehumanize those we decide to exclude or even remove.
Or, perhaps, that’s precisely the point: If we don’t dehumanize them, then we have to own our choices, and take moral responsibility for how we treat those seen in the light of what they truly are rather than what we need them to be to avoid any qualms about our own brutalities.
In the end, it doesn’t matter what you think of me, or even what your opinion is about the policies under discussion. What matters is that each and every one of us strives to avoid the orgies of hatred and irrationality that have played such a prominent role in human history, and that are clearly implicated in the attitudes being expressed by some on this thread. That, at least, would be a step in the right direction.
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(The following is a series of post on the Denver Post comment board for a recent tangentially related column by Tina Griego. The column, and the entire exchange of comments, can be found at http://www.denverpost.com/ci_17811283?source=bb). This column brings to mind SB 126, Colorado ASSET. The students that Tina profiles here are similar to many that I encountered as an ELA (English Language Acquisition) social studies teacher in Denver Public Schools several years ago, most of whom were undocumented immigrants.SB 126 has no fiscal note (it costs taxpayers nothing; in fact, it brings in revenue for our state universities). We offer kids a path to productivity rather than to desperation and criminality, the latter choice having a much different fiscal and social note for us to pay.
To highlight the inhumanity of our current attitudes toward undocumented immigrants (people whose only crime, like humans throughout history, was to migrate from destitution toward opportunity), I could go into the horror stories I encountered while doing a legal internship with Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network and, briefly, with a private immigration lawyer, stories like that of a detainee in Park County who lost limbs due to a staff infection and inadequate conditions and treatment, or of a young diabetic deprived of his insulin by clueless guards while his mother was frantic and helpless over the fact that they were in effect killing her child just for having been taken across the border as a baby. There are others, as bad or worse, and it’s tempting to tell them, but my experience as an ELA teacher is more directly relevant.
Teaching ELA is an unbelievable experience. These are great kids. Most good teachers love their students, but there’s an extra innocence and sweetness about so many ELA students, that connection is really amplified, in both directions. I felt ready to do anything I could to help my ELA kids over the hurdles they’re facing. A few of them were among the very best students anywhere, in every way, the kinds of kids that excel both in terms of commitment and in terms of just plain good nature. Several of my ELA students, whose faces I can still see as I type this, were kids who I felt then, and feel now, simply deserved a chance to succeed in life. And, given that chance, they would pay back the society that provided it a thousand fold.
Tina Griego is right: These children, many of whom are the product of people who found there way here to give their children greater opportunities in life, offer us hope for the future. We, in turn, need to refrain from depriving them, and us, of that hope.
dlprobert wrote: It costs the taxpayers the money that is discounted giving illegals in-state tuition. It costs the schools those funds!! Don’t say it costs us nothing, how dare you!!No, it brings revenue into the schools. In-state tuition, minus the public subsidy that other state residents receive (which is how the bill is drafted), brings in more revenue to the schools than is spent on the students who are paying it. Since in almost all cases they wouldn’t have been able to pay out-of-state tuition, there is no “opportunity cost” of not having charged them the higher amount. This is simply an economic fact.
dlprobert wrote: All of those horror stories you mention could be avoided, had they stayed in their home country an applied to come here legally, waited their turn, like real LEGAL immigrants do. We, the TAX-PAYING AMERICAN CITIZENS, are tired of the coddling of illegals. We want current immigration laws enforced!! We don’t need any new rules!1) The waiting list for current citizens of Latin American countries is upward of 20 years, even with a close relative. There is no “turn” to be waited. The real alternaitve is between migrating toward opportunity, or not migrating toward opportunity. Humans, all through history, have migrated toward opportunity, the lines drawn in the sand by past conquests and wars notwithstanding.
2) Illegal immigrants pay more in taxes for fewer pay-backs than citizens and legal residents, on average. This is another economic fact.
dlprobert wrote:That is what this TAX-PAYING AMERICAN CITIZEN would like to see, not the same old blather your keep throwing at us about how unjust America treats illegals (it’s obviously not bad enough, they keep coming).My “blather” about a commitment to humanity rather than a mere self-serving antagonism to it is “blather” more of us should be “throwing” at each other, far more often and consistently.
dlprobert wrote: Then let them wait 20 years…their other countrymen did!Really? Do you know the history of North American migration and demographics, not to mention American immigration law? First of all, Texas and most of the American West and Southwest belonged to Mexico before it belonged to the United States, until the latter prosecuted a series of opportunistic wars and anexations in order to acquire it. A large portion of the Hispanic population of this part of the country is descended from those who resided here before it became a part of the United States; in other words, the border crossed them. The words “colorado, arizona, california, nevada, los angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, las vegas…” are all Spanish for a reason. (And the iconic American Cowboy is actually of Latin American derivation.)
More recently, we have utilized various immigration policies to bring in cheap labor when it served our purposes, and try to remove it when it didn’t, frequently dividing and disrupting families in the process. We created the flow of people from south of the border, cultivated it, trying to turn it on and off like a spigot at our convenience, another source of chattel for our exploitation.
Most of that population is predominantly indigenous in its ancestry, descendents of the Indians belonging to that larger population we conquered and displaced, and to a large extent simply massacred, to acquire the wealth we now enjoy (a fact that Hitler cited with admiration, as a justification for his own policy of “lebensraum”). That wealth, produced on stolen land, was produced for centuries with the assistance of imported and abused human chattel from Africa.
You’ll notice, also, that I had said that even those with close relatives have waiting times of over 20 years; those without close relatives can’t immigrate, period. And for those who are lucky enough to have a 20-some year waiting period, their main purpose, that of providing their children with better opportunities, is undermined by the wait, since those children will be adults, and will have to get in line themselves at that point!
America has many admirable qualities, and has, at times, strived to be a gift to humanity. But we are also burdened with our fair share of horrible acts of violence against others, and those you disparage now are both descended from our earlier victims, and are in many ways just the latest incarnation of the disposable labor we have so long cultivated and exploited.
dlprobert wrote: We have no more room in our budget for any more! I’m sorry, but the US can only handle so many immigrants. That is why we have immigration in the first place!Actual economic analyses, rather than arbitrary claims in service to blind inhumanity, tells a different story. Most analyses hover around the conclusion that illegal immigration is an economic wash nationally, though the geographical distribution of costs and benefits is uneven. Undocumented immigrants pay taxes, and are denied some of the services they pay for. They solve a fundamental demographic problem in America (the worker-to-retiree ratio), perform some jobs that there really are not American workers willing or able to do (primarily in the agricultural sector), keep consumer prices low and perform a vital function in our overall economy. This debate, which we have had throughout our history, has never been about our capacity to absorb newcomers; it has always been about the bigotry and xenophobia of those who are already here.
dlprobert wrote:Illegals cost the state of Colorado over $1.5B annually….that’s a fact.No, it’s not a fact. Those who have ever done any honest work in the field acknowledge first that we have no firm numbers, for a variety of reasons. Second, the range of conclusions tends toward zero. Third, you’ve obviously cherry picked a number that some propagandist generated for your convenience. It has absolutely no basis in reality.
dlprobert wrote: The money they earn is sent to their real home countries! In fact, the reason El Presidente came here cryin to Obama was, if we started enforcing our immigration laws, the loss of billions to the Mexican economy!They send a significant portion of their earnings to their home countries, where their wives and children and parents are struggling to survive, while they live spartan lives working long hours here generating wealth in our economy. Improving those foreign economies is also good for our own, in a variety of ways, but, more importantly, it is good for humanity, which is the responsibility of all human beings, even the exceedingly fortunate ones who live in the world’s wealthiest nations.
In your orgy of belligerence, you’re anxious to impose a lose-lose scenario on all of us, hurting ourselves in order to punish others for daring to do what humans have done throughout human history. Let’s focus on what my original post was all about: Providing undocumented teenagers with a chance to succeed in our society. The alternative is not, as you imagine, deporting them: The costs of doing so, even ignoring the astonishing inhumanity of it, are far, far greater than any estimation of the costs of not doing so.
The real question is how to manage the costs of a 12 million strong undocumented population in America. You have a choice between pushing them into destitution, even those who are most capable and dedicated to success, breeding predators rather than contributing members of society, or, more intelligently, offering roads for success, by which we all benefit.
There are those in America, as in many other times and places, that are lost in a fog of ignorance and belligerence, viewing the world through a lens of neatly separate nations and races, of “us” and “them” defined along a variety of dimensions. Such people are the authors of genocides, of enslavements, of brutal conquests and exploitations and oppressions. Then there are others, also in many times and places, who recognize that humanity is undivided except by the lines in our own imaginations, that we share a fate, an on-going endeavor, and fare better when we face it with reason and mutual goodwill rather than with irrational belligerence and hatred.
It’s time for people to start choosing which of those groups they wish to belong to with more wisdom and compassion than many here are doing now.
dlprobert wrote: You said…it was war…and to the victor go the spoils!Thank you for being so transparent about your orientation. You are steeped in the notion of violently despoiling others in service to yourself and your tribe; I am steeped in the notion of thriving, cooperatively, in service to humanity.
dlprobert wrote: I choose to be anti-illegal immigrant, like a majority of TAXPAYING AMERICAN CITIZENS are!
And I choose to be a reasonable person of goodwill, as all of us can and should choose to be.
dlprobert wrote: Look Steve, I am really not trying to be an a__
Fair enough. Then let’s have an informative discussion about all relevant considerations and factors.
First, it’s important to note that this conversation didn’t begin as a blanket defense of “illegal immigration.” My personal view, for a variety of reasons, is that the more open the borders (here and elsewhere), the better. This is beneficial to humanity on several levels: It leads to greater global wealth (by removing barriers to the free flow of the factors of production); it increases global distributional justice (by openning up opportunities to earn a larger piece of the pie for those currently with smaller pieces); it creates more cross-cutting ties among nations and peoples, thus preparing us to better deal with our proliferating global rather than national problems and challenges; it reduces the increasing disparity between the wealthy enclaves in the world and the impoverished mass of humanity, almost entirely by raising up those who are somewhat poorer rather than by bringing down those who are somewhat richer, which is not only more humane, but also helps avert a future that is otherwise guaranteed to be full of horrible violence aimed against those rich enclaves, which will be increasingly unable to stem the tide of humanity demanding global structural changes.
But one doesn’t have to agree with this view to agree that we have a practical problem concerning how to assimilate (or remove) the 12 million or so undocumented residents of this country. Removal, as I’ve already pointed out, is simply too expensive (even ignoring the inhumanity of it). By any calculation, the costs far, far, far exceed the benefits. Fiscally and economically, it is simply completely impractical. Added to that is the fact that you would witness something akin to the Nazi round-up of Jews in 1930s and 40s Germany if that were the path we choose to go down. We would, indeed, become a global villain, and would be historically remembered as such.
That’s what happens when people think primarily in terms of “nations” rather than in terms of “humanity.” The Germans of that epoch, you might recall, justified their actions by recourse to nationalism; they were concerned with the welfare of the German people, and with ridding Germany of a foreign element that they considered a burden on their national welfare. It was irrational of them; they couldn’t have been more wrong. And it is irrational of us; we couldn’t be more wrong today.
The reality is that we have a deep historical link to the people you misidentify as mere invaders. About a third of our contiguous territory was a part of Mexico before it was a part of the United States. Many Hispanic residents of that third are descendents of people whom the border crossed rather than of people who crossed the border. We have purposefully exploited the porous border to the south to our benefit, and have created a population that we consider inferior and disposable. “Legally” or “illegally,” they are a part of our nation and our society, and we have a moral oligation to them.
More importantly, for the purposes of this conversation, our own self-interest depends on assimilating those undocumented people. If we want to improve our control of the flow, so be it. But the notion that we should control it by punishing those who are here in order to make our country less attractive to those who aren’t is sheer folly, both because it turns us into something we should not be striving to be, and because it breeds an angry, rebellious, opportunity deprived shadow population that will only, as a result, impose a real cost and burden on our nation, rather than the imaginary one of today.
dlprobert wrote: America cannot continue with it’s handouts to people that are not in this country legally
The notion that those who come here illegally are greater recipients of “hand-outs” than other members of this society is not only mistaken, it is backwards. Yes, some social services (e.g., public education and emergency room treatment) are not withheld from undocumented residents of this country, but most are. They cannot collect on social welfare and economic security programs (e.g., medicaid, unemployment, welfare, social security, etc.). As a result, unlike American citizens and legal permanent residents, if they’re not working, they simply leave. There’s no point in being here, paying for a higher cost of living while receiving no income. So they are virtually all employed, always paying sales taxes and usually paying income taxes (since they generally need to use fake social security numbers to work) for programs that they can’t collect on. They make a vital contribution to the economy, which is why the labor market places such a strong demand on them.
dlprobert wrote: but it’s still ILLEGAL
There is legality, and there is morality, and there is reality. It was once illegal for a slave to escape from his or her master in this country, or for anyone, in any part of the country, to harbor such an escaped slave. In the name of that law, slave owners could send out slave hunters into non-slave states to recapture escaped slaves, and, abusing that law, those slave hunters often captured free African Americans living in free states and sold them into slavery in the south. Legality clearly is not the final word on “right” and “wrong.” So, those of us who recognize moral defects in current laws have a moral obligation to struggle to change those laws in order to cure those defects.
Beyond legality and morality, there is reality. The reality is that humans have always migrated away from destitution and toward opportunity, regardless of the nature or legal status of the invitation they may or may not have received. Jews ended up in Germany as a result of a diaspora, not a German invitation; does that justify the Holocaust?
We create our nations, give them geographic definition, and create laws by which to govern them, but we do not dictate the underlying dynamics of human existence. We live in a world of far greater global interdependence than nationalists would like to admit, in which the plight of others is and will be our own, and violently so tomorrow if we do not recognize it as morally so today.
dlprobert wrote: Those that won’t even try to assimilate…I have a real issue with that. I’m a veteran and when I went to a foreign country, I made it a point to learn the basics of the native language, not only to get along, but to also fit in.
Good for you. You are the exception among Americans, but not among those of other countries. I’ve lived and traveled abroad for over eight years of my adult life (including two stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army, and over two living in Mexico). I’ve known ex-pat Americans, and travelers and tourists, as well as those of other nations, and we are by far the most disrespectful, imperialistic sods out there. Many Americans abroad not only don’t know the language of the country they are in, but are downright offended when citizens of other countries, in their own countries, don’t know English. “The Ugly American” is a term that evolved in light of this dynamic.
As a veteran, I’m sure you recall the phrases “back in the world” and “going back to the world.” That’s how American service members refer to the United States, denegrating other countries (including European allies) by implying that they aren’t even a part of “the world.” America is the whole world in this formulation; other places are unreal, inferior, less worthy of recognition or acknowledgement. So, let’s not decry the imagined cultural insensitivity of those who come to this country and continue to speak their native language (or continue to speak the language established here before we forcefully anexed this region).
And, lets’ be honest: While some first-generation Hispanics who reside here don’t know much English, the impression that that is the norm is reinforced by selective perception. Most learn more than “the basics” of English. I detect a bit of an attribution and confirmation bias in your above characterization: You didn’t claim fluency; might it be that your “basics” of those other languages, of which you’re so proud, represents a comparable level of language proficiency to the failure to learn English you detect in others?
There are basically two ways to see the world: In terms of “us” v. “them,” or in terms of humanity. We will all benefit in the long run, enormously, the more we gravitate toward the latter orientation and leave the former one on the dust heap of history, where it belongs.
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Colin Powell spoke out on immigration reform recently (http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_16119612). He said what every reasonable person knows: That we have to provide a road to legal status for the roughly 12 million who are here illegally, and that we have to recognize that fairly massive immigration is still part of the life-blood of this country.
As Powell recognizes, leaving intact an underground undocumented population that constitutes over three percent of the entire population is simply untenable. Identifying, detaining, and removing a significant portion of that population is prohibitively costly, inhumane, and destructive to our own economy. The only reasonable course of action, by any measure, is to provide a path to some kind of legal status, and to make it more attractive than remaining undocumented.
Also, as Powell realizes, those millions of undocumented immigrants are fully integrated into our economy, into our culture, and into our society. Simply removing them, even aside from the incredible inhumanity involved, would send shock waves through all three. It would undermine our economic vitality, disrupt our social systems and networks, and impoverish our culture.
Virtually everyone agrees that some kind of immigration reform is necessary. The argument is over what form it should take.
A few quick facts to keep in mind:
1) The United States has historically exploited the permeability of our southern border, and the relative poverty south of it, to create a membrane through which cheap disposable labor can pass (sometimes assertively imported) when it is convenient for us, and can be blocked and removed when it is inconvenient for us.
2) The true economic impact of illegal immigration is far more complex, and far less large, than the xenophobes contend. Most analyses conclude that there is either pretty much a net nation-wide economic wash, or a small net nation-wide economic gain due to illegal immigration, though the distribution of costs and benefits does lead to real strains on local social services. Illegal immigrants pay far more taxes, and are far more obstructed from collecting the benefits funded for by those taxes, than some people realize. Most importantly, they are paying into social security to support current retirees, but are not accruing social security benefits upon which they can draw.
3) Human beings have always migrated away from poverty and toward opportunity, and always will. Any responsible parent would place greater weight on their children’s future than on the prohibition to cross a line drawn in the sand by historical (and opportunistic) military conflicts. To villify people for doing so is simply reprehensible.
4) The more factors of production can flow freely, which includes how open borders are, the more global wealth is produced, and, in this case, the less inequitably it is distributed.
5) We rely on massive immigration demographically, with a burgeoning retired population and a shrinking working-age population supporting them. Immigrants come to work, redressing that imbalance.
Here’s my analysis:
From a global economic efficiency and distributional justice point-of-view, the ideal is the free flow of people and goods across borders. From a global leadership and fairness in distributing the burden point-of-view, the US should be in the lead on moving the world in the direction of that ideal.
I’m both a global humanist and a realist: I recognize the ideals we should be striving for, and the current realities that force us to compromise our efforts. One of the realities of the world is that people are locally and immediately biased: costs and benefits closer to home and closer to the present are weighted much more heavily than costs and benefits farther from home and farther in the future.
I’m less sympathetic to the reactions of people who resent (though are only marginally burdened by) the unstoppable flow of people from poverty and destitution toward opportunity than I am cognizant of its inevitability. For that reason, more than any other, we need federal laws that are enforceable, and that are a reasonable compromise between who and what we should be, and who and what we are.
The history of immigration law in America is a lot uglier than a lot of people realize, more often racist than not, and still somewhat brutal in the fierce protection of what’s ours, even against the most innocent and vulnerable victims of a cruel world. It’s hard to admire that, when the vast majority in America are walking around with i-phones, and pay cable subscriptions, and live comfortably and eat well. And here’s one of my objections to some in my own party: the branch of American labor that does not recognize any international responsibility beyond protecting our own wealth against foreign intrusion is as odious to me as any aspect of right-wing ideology.
Furthermore, we are capable of restructuring our priorities, and investing in our future, in ways which will provide native-born Americans with better opportunities to fill higher-paying, more information-intensive positions in our national (and the global) economy, leaving those eager souls from beyond our borders with the opportunity to fill the lower-paying, unskilled positions that Americans no longer want. This is, to a limited extent, the nature of illegal immigration today; in reality, the demand for low-paid foreign labor exists because Americans want, and can usually find, better opportunities (and the demand for highly paid, highly skilled foreign labor exists because we are failing to educate our own children to be able to satisfy it). But to the extent that there still is some competition for jobs between those born here or here legally, at the bottom of our economic ladder, and those who are newly arriving illegally, a greater commitment on our part to robust and effective public education, and provision of affordable, varied higher educational opportunities, will mitigate this problem, by moving those already here up the economic ladder, and leaving the rungs at the bottom to those newly arriving.
Even so, the use of immigrant labor to depress wages and to displace higher paid American labor still exists. Despite our relative wealth and comfort, the pressures and anxieties of an uncertain economy, of an uncertain future, of family responsibilities and assumptions about what we will be able to give to our children, all make our protectionist reflexes understandable, if neither ideal nor admirable. I’m not unsympathetic to the worker whose livelihood is made less secure by the competition of desparately poor people elsewhere, nor to the folks in border states and communities whose local resources are strained by undocumented waves of humanity pouring in.
But I’m a human being first, and an American second. The problems and stresses of Americans are nothing compared to the problems and stresses of those against whom we are protecting ourselves. And our mythologies and rationalizations with which we reassure ourselves that that is just and right do not in any way actually make it just and right. Furthermore, our own long-term interests are best served by including massive immigration in the equation, and creating a context in which those who enter fill positions that those who are here no longer need to settle for.
So that’s the nature of the challenge, as I see it. How do we negotiate all of those imperatives, all of those needs, all of those legitimate concerns? I don’t know. But the first step is to achieve a higher degree of honesty about the nature of the world in which we live, and the nature of the role we play, and could play, in it.
