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Published On: Sat, Jun 23rd, 2018

POLITICS NAVIGATING BETWEEN THE WAVES OF JUSTICE AND POWER

As the great value of education for every citizen, since last century, has been recognized by almost all governments in the world, such generally has resulted in better attention being given to elevate the quality of life for all their citizens by means of government policies promoting education. But while we all know how important politics itself also is for our lives (“from the cradle to the grave”) still, in major parts of the world, including on our islands of the former Netherlands Antilles, the education regarding politics has remained very limited. What here exists is mainly some school literature regarding the formal legal organization of government or as a subject of social science without thereby throwing a first good light on the internal structure and functioning of politics. With this introductory work about politics we’d like to contribute to this issue and show, already in this first chapter of our upcoming book that it requires serious and honest attention from each citizen as it touches important individual and community values. We would like to do that from a brief account of a matter which in this month of June, 2018 is causing a lot of tension in the United States of America, “USA”, and which, in the near future also will be forcing the “Americans” to do some deep soul searching before honestly being able to say they deserve the title they have given their nation of “the greatest democracy in the world”. That is because of the policy which the actual administration of president Donald Trump, through a public announcement by its Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has introduced in the last month of April for refugees who have entered the USA seeking asylum against the danger of being caused great damage or even losing their life in their own country. The USA is partially affiliated to the Convention of 1951 of the United Nations regarding the Status of Refugees. 

Sessions then had declared that his administration would maintain a policy of zero tolerance regarding immigrants who enter the USA illegally, containing that the adults involved will be criminally prosecuted and their minor children removed from them and locked up in separate quarters.

After two months of this new policy it now appears that around 2000 youngsters forcefully have been taken from their parents, sometimes pulled away from their breastfeeding mothers and with toddlers crying and screaming for their parents. It also appeared that at the time this article was written the government could not account for around 1500 of the children. When the press started questioning Trump and Sessions they blamed previous governments which had implemented the law they were now executing, which was very disputable as no previous government had tried to treat children in such a cruel manner. After that, following Sessions, other government officials also had been declaring that the bible itself (Roman:13) “commands the citizens to obey the laws of government”. While indeed many, particularly American Evangelists, have agreed with said explanation, there were also many, including other Evangelists, who called said policy inhumane and against many declarations of Jesus of Nazareth, the founder of Christianity, like “Love they Neighbor”, Mark: 12:31 and “Let the children come to me”, Mateus: 19:14. Others also commented that this Trump policy gives new evidence that he wants the USA to remain in the first place a country for white people.

What we see happening there is nothing less than two of the most fundamental values of our daily lives and of politics: justice and power, functioning by means of human activities with very dramatic results. While they ought to function complementing each other such can be in a critical manner and also can result in them strongly opposing each other. Still, in essence they emerge from the same source of our amazing human consciousness, from which we also ought to evaluate all our activities and underlying values related to our lives and politics in particular. That’s why we want to approach this work from our human consciousness although such will become more apparent, later in the course of this work.
Before reaching there we first have to stop at a few other important phenomena, like, in the next chapter, the one regarding the use of words in common parlance and also in politics: the relationship between words and their meaning.

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