March For Decency

Display evoking separated children in Dayton, Ohio,
one of Satruday's protests held in 700 different cities

I definitely enjoy my day job, but if there are measurable downsides to working in the real estate industry (aside from obnoxious residents), having to work alternate weekends is certainly among them.

Back on January 21st, 2017, I was proud to be amongst the hundreds of thousands of people around the world to join the Women's March in opposition to the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Had I not had to work this past weekend, I certainly would have been one of the thousands of people who took to the streets on Saturday to express non-violent opposition to the Trump administration's needlessly cruel immigration policies.


Instead, I kicked in a few bucks to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to support their ongoing, multi-pronged efforts to support not just the rights of undocumented immigrants, but the legal rights of all Americans as well.

I felt like it was important to do something besides gripe about Trump's rampant idiocy and the ACLU has filed suit inn federal court to put a halt to the family separations - last Thursday ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, "The government's efforts are ridiculous. We can't just let the government go along the way they've been going, where kids can spend eight months separated."

Support for organizations like the ACLU, CASA in Action and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center is more critical than ever.

Especially considering that unaccompanied migrant children forcefully separated from their parents as young as three-years-old have been forced to appear in court to defend themselves.

These kinds of widely-condemned policies result from the Trump administration directing the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and the Department of Justice under Attorney General Jeff Sessions to use the federal government as a tool to leverage the right-wing extremist ideology that now defines the Republican Party.

Honestly, what kind of administration directs authorities to have three-year-olds defend themselves in a court of law? If you're a parent, picture your three-year-old child appearing in court alone.

American children got a lesson in Democracy as
they marched for immigrants rights on Saturday

As NBC News reported on Thursday, Lindsay Toczylowski, the executive director of the Immigrant Defender's Law Center in Los Angeles observed,

"We were representing a three-year-old in court recently who had been separated from the parents. And the child -in the middle of the hearing- started climbing up on the table."

That's flat out unacceptable by the standards of any modern civilized society, period.


The absurdity of that kind of nightmarish scenario taking place in 21st century America is just one of the reasons that hundreds of thousands of people turned out in more than 700 different cities across the U.S. and around the world on Saturday.

Last Thursday, an estimated 633 women were arrested after they staged a non-violent sit-in inside the lobby of the U.S. Senate's Hart Office Building in Washington, D.C. to demand that Congress enact legislation to end the Trump administration's policy of separating families locking up those seeking asylum - which is legal under U.S. law by the way.

The women who participated in the D.C. sit-in last Thursday donned themselves in foil blankets to evoke the haunting images of unaccompanied migrant children forcefully separated from their parents by the Trump administration huddled in foil blankets in warehouses and other hastily-constructed migrant detention facilities.

Around midday on the same day, nearby a group of kids wrapped in foil blankets also held their own demonstration inside the Capitol Building as they chanted "Shame!" while onlookers, supporters and members of the press looked on and captured the images on social media.

Speaking of shame, considering the intentional cruelty of the draconian immigration policies enacted at Herr Trump's behest, he doesn't seem to have whole lot of it - and based on her tacky fashion choice last week, neither does his wife.

Melania Trump sports her "troll jacket" last week

Perhaps Melania Trump should consider covering her face in shame with one of those foil blankets in the wake of her odd decision to wear that offensive, tasteless green Zara jacket when she made her second photo-op visit to a Texas border detention facility last week.

With blistering Texas temperatures hovering in the 90's, Melania's decision to accessorize with a $39 olive green Zara coat with the words "I DON'T REALLY CARE. DO U?  emblazoned on the back called into question her taste, fashions sense and ethics.

In an op-ed posted on the dependably-conservative Forbes.com on Sunday, Fruzsina Eordogh called Melania's unseasonable outerwear a "troll jacket" and suggested that:

"The jacket sabotaged not just any peace and goodwill that could have been fostered by positive headlines of the government appearing somewhat competent, it also severely damaged Melania's brand. CNN talking heads called it a "PR disaster.""

Frankly I'm not loosing sleep over the damage to Melania's "brand", if she was so concerned about that she shouldn't have married a lying, twice-married serial philanderer who slept with porn star Stormy Daniels while Melania was pregnant with Trump's child Baron.

I'm not buying Donald Trump's rambling suggestion that his wife's jacket was not meant as a not-so-subtle message to the right-wing supporters who salivate over his vilification of immigrants to the United States.

Zara, the maker of Melania's "troll jacket" also made
this tasteful Holocaust prisoner shirt-thing - WTF?

From calling Mexican people "rapists", "murderers" and "drug dealers"on the first day of his presidential campaign, to his suggestion that there were some "very fine people" amongst the neo-Nazi's who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump has gone out of his way to toss out klutzy wink-wink-nod-nods to the white supremacists and extremists that he openly cultivates and panders to.

As DailyKos reported last week, Zara, the company that makes the $39 jacket Melania wore to a humanitarian crisis in Texas last week, aren't exactly strangers to controversial fashion designs.

As a Twitter user named Molly helpfully pointed out last Thursday, Zara has also come under fire for selling a shirt that looks alarmingly similar to the infamous striped prison garb worn by Jewish prisoners of Nazi concentration camps during WWII (pictured above).

They also sold a shirt that says "White Is The New Black" - really.

Anyway, kudos to the hundreds of thousands in more than 700 different cities and towns who stood up against Trump's immigration policies on Saturday.

Those mass protests last week were about more than just the way the Trump administration treats people who immigrate to this country.

It wasn't just a statement on policy, it was also a march for decency, and what the vast majority of Americans (and people around the world) think this country really stands for.