In a July 15 story (“McGovern on border crisis: ‘We need to fix this’”), Dusty Christensen writes that anger over “…the Trump administration’s detention of migrants in squalid conditions…” is “… on the left?” So, no one in the center, no conservatives or people farther on the right are righteously indignant or expressing concern about the conditions at the border?
Why use language that serves to divide us? Why not say people are angry, or there is rising anger? Study after study shows that despite the ongoing narrative of polarization in the media, people in the U.S. want the same basic things: food security, quality education for their children, affordable health care and housing, a job that pays a living wage and freedom from violence to name a few.
Concerning immigration, a Harvard-Harris poll released earlier in the summer found 88 percent of likely voters are opposed to Trump’s family separation policies; 73 percent back “comprehensive immigration reform.”
My takeaway from this: Ideas about immigration may vary widely from those who want no immigration to those who want open borders. But very few people beyond the radicals in the Trump administration support dehumanizing and cruel policies that separate parents from their children and imprisons them in squalid conditions.
Language matters. Every time we read or hear “the left, the center or the right,” we feel the existence of a “divide,” imagine ourselves in one category and others in other categories. I think it would be helpful in these frightening times, when we need to pull together for the good the country and of the planet, to talk about specific issues, and how a person feels or will vote on that issue, without putting a broad label on anyone.
Claudia Lefko
Northampton