Yes postpone them, or cancel them altogether.
If the debates had been scheduled for the Sept. 12, 2001, they’d have been cancelled.
If they had been scheduled for December 8, 1941, they’d have been cancelled.
The day after the Challenger disaster, or Hurricane Harvey, or Super Storm Sandy—cancelled, cancelled, and cancelled.
There are times when more important matters occur, and something as artificially important as watching 23 candidates throw their hats into a ring designed for a lot fewer makes no sense to me, not with what is happening, has happened, and will continue to happen at our southern border.
Let’s be honest—we have no workable, feasible, cogent immigration plan, but we could.
While we’re being honest, we do have an abhorrent and monstrous president who has used that absence of direction to torture children, destroy families, and portray America not as it is represented by the Statue of Liberty or the Constitution, or even accepted attitudes, but as some massive detention camp where jackbooted thugs carry out the president’s policies while their colleagues prepare to roam the cities and make matters worse.
If this mistreatment of children—of human beings—were happening in a foreign country and we were aware of it, we would be outraged. Instead we reserve our outrage for people who refer to these detention centers as concentration camps. Isn't that what they are? places where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities. Now it's true that sometimes these prisoners are used as slave labor and sometimes they are retained only until they can be killed. But the description of the camp itself is spot on.
There are ideas afloat on how to stop this crisis. But some Democrats are afraid that earmarking funds to improve the lot of these abused children will put more cash in Trump’s coffers so that he can extend the wall, hire more I.C.E. agents, in short continue to make punitive changes in lieu of humanitarian ones. Republicans are, as usual, afraid of of upsetting their dear leader, and so once again have traded decency for position.
Both parties, shirking responsibility for decades(!)—have left the country in shambles. There’s work to be done—an exigency to act now and save lives—and we’re planning to have a debate?
I might watch a panel discussion with leaders from both parties admitting their ineptitude and inhumanity and maybe, with the world watching, coming up with some groundwork for improvement—even something simple like no more children will forgo necessities. That I might watch.
Twenty-three people with ideas? No thanks. Not this week.
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