One October nonsurprise would be the recent news that lawyers say they can't find the parents of 545 migrant children separated from their families at our southern border. The kids are still here, but the whereabouts of their parents is unknown. In most of the cases, the parents were likely deported while the kids, having been taken from them, remained in US custody.
Is it incompetence or indifference? The lawyers who can't find the parents are in no way responsible. They were appointed by a federal judge to help clean up the mess. But it seems the mess is too great.
That the lawyers can't perform the task assigned them by the judge should be attributed to the indifference of the Trump administration. The administration is also incompetent, but when cruelty is the point, as with the family separation policy at the border, there was no reason to keep track of who belonged to whom and who went where. Of course the court-appointed lawyers can't find the parents. The administration never intended for the families to be reunited. That only became the goal after courts to some degree wrested the problem from Trump and his people.
Another nonsurprise is that the coronavirus did not disappear by Easter, or by Memorial Day, or when the weather got hot, and, now that it's October and cold again, still has not "lifted like a miracle" as we were promised. For the past month, it's been killing on average about 750 Americans per day—see the 7-day moving average of daily deaths at Worldometer, here. That's seven 9/11 body counts in the last month as the president, campaigning Monday in Arizona, castigated CNN for covering it as if it were a problem or something. He speaks openly of his boredom with the subject. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose he has no ideas.
"It is what it is." "Don't let it dominate you." "Fauci is a disaster!"
The pope is in favor of civil unions for same-sex couples? I didn't think that would happen till gay people were marrying in Saudi Arabia. An actual October surprise!
Comments