Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Vladimir Putin has trumpeted the growth of national populist movements in Europe and America, crowing that liberalism is spent as an ideological force.

In an FT interview in the Kremlin on the eve of the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, the Russian president said “the liberal idea” had “outlived its purpose” as the public turned against immigration, open borders and multiculturalism.

Mr Putin’s evisceration of liberalism — the dominant western ideology since the end of the second world war in 1945 — chimes with anti-establishment leaders from US president Donald Trump to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and the Brexit insurgency in the UK.

“[Liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades,” he said.

Mr Putin branded Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than 1m refugees to Germany, mainly from war-ravaged Syria, as a “cardinal mistake”. But he praised Donald Trump for trying to stop the flow of migrants and drugs from Mexico.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

One of my recent Facebook posts was a quote from the late Presbyterian preacher D. James Kennedy: “Tolerance is the last virtue of a depraved society. When you have an immoral society that has blatantly, proudly, violated all of the commandments of God, there is one last virtue they insist upon: tolerance for their immorality.”

Tolerance, in the face of the violation of the commandments of God, is no virtue at all.

The Parkersburg News and Sentinel embraced such tolerance in its Sunday edition with a front-page story of the LGBTQ event [last] Saturday at the Parkersburg City Park. Sexual deviancy is going mainstream.

But is it OK because society says it’s OK? Who makes the decision of what is right and wrong? First principles begin somewhere: they are the universal, absolute truths that define for us what is right and what is wrong; they are the principles that we don’t argue to, but that we argue from–the starting point; the fountainhead.

There was a time in America–not too long ago–that the Bible was that fountainhead; that teacher of first principles; that arbiter of right and wrong. That is quickly fading.

So, who defines marriage? Who defines sexuality? There was a day in our country when God defined both; when Americans believed monolithically that transcendent absolute truth came from the Bible. In fact, we were, in those days, without the chaos that we have in our culture today. But no more. ...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

“I am fearful when I watch the slow chiseling away of civil rights, tolerance, compassion and acceptance. I am saddened when I see this country’s pride in being a nation built on the belief, trust and hard work of immigrants challenged by the rhetoric of racism … After all, I have personal experience with the rise of the most shameful event of the 20th century.”

These words from Bernard Marks, published in The Sacramento Bee in 2017, resonated with me as I grappled with how to respond to the Trump administration’s increasingly vicious attacks on Latinos.

The latest outrages:

▪ Imprisoned children deprived of toothbrushes and beds, left to linger in their own waste

▪ Threats of mass raids and deportations

▪ A shocking photograph of the bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his baby daughter, Valeria, clinging together after they drowned in the Rio Grande

Marks, a Sacramento man who survived the Holocaust, died in December at 89. He spent his final years speaking out with fierce moral clarity against a resurgence of the same hate and authoritarian tactics that preceded his imprisonment in Auschwitz and Dachau.

As debate raged over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of the term “concentration camp,” I remembered Marks’ words.

Nothing in modern times compares to the Holocaust, but the term concentration camp predates it by decades. One Cambridge Dictionary definition for the term is “a place where large numbers of people are kept as prisoners in extremely bad conditions, especially for political reasons.”

This describes what’s happening in a Texas camp where “a chaotic scene of sickness and filth” was unfolding, according to The New York Times.