Amen, Jim!
The spirit behind this ban is no doubt a responsibility of both parties. I don't see how you (I'm not pointing the finger at anyone - just speaking generally) can be against Trump's Muslim ban, and not against Obama's/Hillary's drones that were extrajudicially taking people's lives in some of these same countries. Even worse, how about our support of Saudi Arabia's devastating attacks on Yemen's civilians? Obama sold Saudi Arabia $115 billion in weapons (more than any other president), and Tillerson doesn't seem to be opposed to their use of internationally banned cluster weapons. To me, murder/war is much more severe than banning travel, but as long as something is finally getting criticized within the USA, I'm happy.
This is all enabled by a divisive fear/evil both political parties of the USA are plagued with - a neo-crusade against Islam. And of course, the divisiveness is politically-charged, because there's absolutely nothing in the bible that justifies anything but peace and love for Muslims. Same with Muslims towards Christians. Likewise, to say the intention of this ban is to "make America safe" is straight up manipulative and conflicts with the explanation of the ban's architect.
Fast forward to 3:00 of this video (
https://youtu.be/l9GKL6i38pI?t=2m57s), and if you still believe we're "making America safe", then please ask yourself, "From what!?" Even a known warmonger like McCain is honest enough to admit, "We fear this executive order may do more to help terrorist recruitment than improve our security."
When choosing where to stand on this issue, we have three choices:
1) Magnify the divisiveness by pointing the finger at a race, religion, or civilians of another nation (i.e. general groups of people like you and me).
2) Stand by idly and enable these atrocities to continue.
3) Protest this gross assault on human rights and do what we can to prevent it.
When I was a kid and learned about slavery and segregation, I told myself I never would have stood by as those human rights were abused. Today, it's gut check time. Yes, it's been in motion of a long time masked by the loosely applied word "terrorist", but today, our country is
officially and outwardly adopting a much broader attack on a
religion (that happens to translate to "peace"). The broader the assault, the greater the amount of alarms that should be going off in our heads. We should all be questioning, "Who am I being instructed to hate, and why?"
Anyways, thanks for the photos yesterday, Jim! It was great seeing you there! To all else, that's me in the first one. The sign was a general and specific statement at the same time. I have neighbors on my street that are Iranian. The wife can no longer travel home to visit her family and vice versa even though they were doing so on a regular basis. Absolutely ridiculous.