Define a good citizen

Dear Readers,

When I was in college, I took this wonderful yearlong, double-seminar class called “Human Being & Citizen.” It was designed to look at how we define and value citizenship from both a humanities and social scientist (hence, the double-credit class) perspective. We read works ranging from Plato and Thucydides, to St. Augustine and the Bible, to John Stuart Mill, trying to understand what makes a moral person. Loved it!

The American experiment is supposed to be imbued with a system of law and government as close as possible to moral perfection, while also dividing power to prevent one-person or even one-class rule. The “Three-fifths Compromise” in our constitution, making dark-skinned kidnappees from Africa less than a person, was an immoral blotch on that glossy ideal. We struggle today to seek redemption from this original sin.

Maybe the stain of this original sin prevents us from considering the morality of our laws. We put so little thought and energy into answering questions about moral choices and simply lack the time and inclination to consider what we can learn from the “great books” of our heritage. Instead, we react in spasms of anguish or fear. So many of our policy debates are driven by emotion instead of reason or even the lodestar of morality.

Examples abound. Take immigration. During the presidential campaign, and in governing, Donald Trump has preyed on our fears of faceless brown illegal immigrants. He defines them as overwhelming our job markets, stealing good jobs from able-bodied citizens, raping and killing our women; living off of government aid without paying taxes and creating chain-bridges of family immigration, an invasion of more brown faces to overwhelm our “natural citizenship” born and bred here.

All of these fears are demonstrably false. Yet, our disdain for, and fear of, immigration blinds us and leads us onto an immoral path. Men and women who have been here for decades, committing no crimes, paying taxes, raising good families and who have been a positive influence on their local communities, are ripped from the arms of loved ones, chained and deported back to whence they came. There is no judgment utilized, no weighing of moral outcomes, just lock and load . . .

We sink to even lower in moral depths when it comes to children. Let’s start with children taken here by their parents as minors, the so-called “Dreamers.” We have spent the past decade or debating what to do about them.

These potential citizens are blameless, they cannot be held responsible for decisions made by parents or guardians. Many know no other home than the United States. Deporting them to a strange homeland is nothing short of cruel. And they have successfully integrated into our communities and become hard-working social assets – they have done everything we demand of any immigrant (legal or illegal) seeking refuge or a new beginning in our great country.

Yet, Congress, out of political spite, has rejected any type of moral legal solution. Initially, this just due to genuflection against President Obama. Now, we cannot have a solution because . . . Well, actually, I do not know why we there is no legal solution, except that President Trump did not get the “wall (paid for by Mexico),” funded by American taxpayers and/or maybe its just partisan sniping or fear of more brown-faced voters.

What is worse is what we are doing to children fleeing from gangs, slavery, and starvation in Central America – Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Thanks to our backwards drug policies, the MS-13 Hispanic gang has become militarized in U.S. prisons and exported back to these countries. They are raping children and impressing young boys into choosing gang-service or death.

Overall, illegal immigration across our Southern Border is at its lowest levels in almost half-a-century. There is no “crisis,” just the opposite. What we are experiencing is a surge in unaccompanied minors desperately fleeing across Mexico to evade certain death and abuse, if returned home. When they get to the border, we are putting them in detention centers, instead of bringing them to families willing to host them (whether relations or not) and denying abortions to women impregnated by gang-member rapists back home. This is the depth to which the “Shining City on the Hill” has sunk.

The idea that we govern by emotion, instead of reason, extends to the debate about limiting gun rights. Many of the proposals by gun control advocates, rationally, would prove ineffective to preventing the mass killings plaguing us. In the throes of grief, we are whipped into a frenzy and demand some type of new gun control legislation, regardless of the probity of the proposals. The goal at least, preventing senseless death and mayhem, is moral.

Of course, on the other side of this debate, gun advocates also abandon all reason and morality. They refuse to have a healthy and reasoned debate, as the NRA labels all gun control proposals as an anathema. The very idea of even gathering data and researching preventatives is considered a heretic abandonment of American basic values. There can be no morality in refusing to do something to prevent the massacre of our precious children.

It would be nice if we would stop arguing with each other and get back to some moral considerations in our laws and how we interpret them. There is still time for America to return to a higher path and crawl out of the current political gutter in which we find ourselves. All it takes is the will to do so and the energy to really consider what is right and just.

Warner Robins attorney Jim Rockefeller is the former Chief Assistant District Attorney for Houston County, and a former Assistant State Attorney in Miami. Owner of Rockefeller Law Center, Jim has been in private practice since 2000. E-mail your comments or confidential legal questions to jim@rockefellerlawcenter.com.

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