We are what we do and we need to stop doing what we are doing!

We need to stop hurting people. 

We need to stop hiding behind false pretexts and face-saving, throwaway “charity,” and fraudulent humanitarianism. 

We need to tell the truth about our policies and practices past and present. 

Amend our ways and mend the damage we’ve have done. 

Set ourselves free to be good people, a nation courageous enough to be a cooperating nation with other nations and peoples of the world. Helping them—indeed helping our own citizens and society—to move forward nonviolently and according to each nation’s needs and basic aspirations.

If we can enter countries and overthrow governments, weaponize, militarize and terrorize their people, criminalize and arm some against others, if we can provoke and/or aid in the overthrow of governments and create unlivable chaos (and floods of refugees we then, again, brutalize, abandon and bar from our country!) —if we can hurt human beings in such unspeakable ways, we can also amend and reverse what we have put in place.

W

     e can meet nonviolently, respectfully with leaders, individuals and factions. Cooperatively help nations and peoples mend their countries, and 

Build fundamental human rights and governing structures, not sky rises and cellular towers

Establish criminal and civil laws and law enforcement with able local professionals, not terrorizers or exploiters

Build systems and structures such as clean running water, clean air, sanitation facilities, well-funded and sustainable health and ethical health professionals, welfare and ethical welfare professionals, employment and educational services and institutions—and

Ensure the ultimate goal of self governance and self determination!

If we can tear down, we can build up.

My   comments are pegged to the ongoing manufactured crisis of migration and a recent “Democracy Now!” interview with Texas-based Human Rights Lawyer Jennifer Harbury during which Harbury said, “Quite aside from our national identity, our government helped to create the cartels.

Most of the heads of the cartels are former military intelligence leaders who were trained in the United States, armed by the United States, worked carefully with the United States during the genocide era, as documented in the United Nations Truth Commission report.”

Former U.S. President Bill “Clinton ended up issuing an apology to the people of Guatemala. But we basically created this cadre of people and worked with them ’til the end of the genocide, which left 200,000 people murdered …, and 660 Mayan villages wiped off the map.”

The current U.S. administration treats asylum seekers even worse than their predecessors. They are conducting, in Harbury's words, a “campaign of punishment, not of cartel people; but of the victims of the cartels.” 

This means that asylum seekers having done no wrong are thrown into horrific places, subjected to unspeakable indecencies just for having asked the United States of America to help them.

News source

Democracy Now! “Human Rights Lawyer Jennifer Harbury on How Trump Is Punishing Cartels’ Victims—Not Its Members” July 9, 2018

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue to look at President Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy at the U.S. border, we turn now to Texas-based human rights lawyer Jennifer Harbury, who’s lived in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas for more than 40 years.

Her husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, a Mayan comandante, was disappeared after he was captured by the Guatemalan army in the 1980s.

After a long protest campaign, Harbury found U.S. involvement in the murder and cover-up of her husband. Now she continues to work with people fleeing violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, who have come to the United States seeking asylum, and makes connections between U.S. foreign policy and people seeking political asylum in Central America.

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/9/human_rights_lawyer_jennifer_harbury_on

Insight Beyond Today’s News, CLB