Understandable in a five year old but in the collective population or as national policy, its dangerous. When national policies are created and enforced through the lens of ‘us’ and ‘them’ they easily lead to the creation of a scapegoat for all our own worries, woes and shortcomings. When our problems are assigned the fault of someone else we absolve ourselves of responsibility to keep our ego intact. When ‘those people’ are allocated as the root cause for our own troubles it is a quick light step to wanting to contain them, control them or remove them altogether with the idea that the troubles will go away with them.
We look at videos and newsreels, especially the ICE raids and use terms such as citizen, legals, illegals, and immigrants - all being thrown around when discussing the treatment of who we see on the screen. But we end up discriminating against the humanity of the person we see. Many of us in the nation were outraged when Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed as ‘U.S. Citizens’ but as human beings it became a secondary issue. Eight people have died so far in 2026 while in custody of ICE or its detention centers and ICE agents have shot several people. Can you name any of the others? I can’t.
The technique of pointing the collective finger at a group of people and blaming them for all sorts of national distress including financial downfalls and any regression of what we deem as a national morality or standard is an old playbook. In times of societal downturn, its much easier to blame someone different than ourselves for why we don’t have what we think we deserve than to take a look inward and admit where we could have made better decisions.
When someone is stripped of their humanity it can be much easier and with much less guilt to treat them as less than human, an animal. We can beat them, pick them up off the street, put them in a cage and make them disappear because “those people” are less, less than us. But when it happened to Renee and Alex there was outrage and rightly so for them but also for all. Citizenship over humanship easily leads to a nationalistic fascism.
We need to remember that when we use the terms citizen, legal or illegal immigrant that they all deserve the rights, respect and dignity of being a human being. The first group we were all assigned to was that of the human race.
Sarah Fox
Dayton
It’s time to take action on taxes
Paying taxes is gotten so far out of hand. No one is willing to do anything other than rob the people of Ohio.
Gov. Mike DeWine should have been removed years ago. My money goes to the school, I’m told but who really knows.
It’s time the people of Ohio take action as they are doing to get this problem straighten out because the leaders have never cared.
Phillip Arvin
Springfield