As I write this, a crowd at a Trump rally is chanting “send her back, send her back!” The President had invoked the name of Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, whom he falsely accused of praising Al-Qaeda, and the crowd morphed into a hate chorus. “Send her back,” they scream over and over. “Send her back!” Trump is attacking Omar, along with the three other congresswomen who comprise “the Squad,” Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The President has decided to goose his re-election effort with a hate campaign against them and his twitterpated followers don’t question why the most powerful person on Earth persists in punching down.
“Send her back” is a variation of “go back to where you came from.” When you tell someone to “go back to where you came from,” you are not blowing them a kiss. It’s one of the most aggressive phrases in any language and the target of the language knows exactly what it means. When Seung-Hui Cho had difficulty reciting, classmates taunted the Korean-American, telling him to “go back to China.” He was socially awkward and seemed like an easy target of bullies and their enablers until he opened fire on the Virginia Tech campus and killed 32 people. Cho left a manifesto that raged with the pain of a million humiliations. “Oh, the happiness I could have had mingling among you hedonists,” he wrote, “being counted as one of you.” But he was always told to go back to where he came from. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” he wrote. “All the shit you’ve given me, right back at you with hollow points.”
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cites the phrase “Go back to where you came from” as an example of “potentially unlawful conduct.” There is a reason for that. “(T)he idea that we don’t have any more room for people, or those people don’t look like us, this is a long, ugly strain in American history,” Michael Cornfield of George Washington University told NPR. “They carry these sentiments that we have seen over centuries, but then they get repurposed for the current moment,” said Jennifer Wingard of the University of Houston. “‘(G)o back where you came from’ is the same as ‘go back to your own country’ is the same as ‘you are not allowed here’ is the same as ‘no immigrants allowed,’” she added. “Yet it carries all of this historical shorthand with it.”
Trump has tapped into the vein. “So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world,” he tweeted. “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Since three of the congresswomen were born in the USA, the President literally described his own country as “a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.” If his followers paid attention and had any sense of logic, that would be a damaging admission. Kellyanne “Alternative Facts” Conway came to his rescue, telling Breakfast Media’s Andrew Feinberg that Trump meant “originally” from, not literally from – after curiously asking Feinberg “What’s your ethnicity?“ She elaborated on Twitter. “We are all from somewhere else “originally,” she tweeted. “I asked the question to answer the question and volunteered my own ethnicity: Italian and Irish.” Should Trump tell Kellyanne to go back to where she came from, presumably she would be subdivided and returned to Italy and Ireland respectively.
Since I frequently criticize Trump, I pondered how to respond should he tell me to go back to where I came from, taking into account Kellyanne Conway’s definition. Which totally broken and crime infested place should I go back to and help fix? Rather than being subdivided, I would choose an origin that exceeds five percent of my heritage on Ancestry.com. For example, my largest ancestral background is in “Eastern Europe and Russia.” I can’t fix Russia; Putin has that covered. My Mother’s family came from Hungary, but Trump likes its autocratic Prime Minister, Viktor Orban. Nothing to fix there either. The next highest category is Spain. Perhaps I should go back and fix that messy Catalan thing. But that would mean learning at least two more languages.
Next comes “Ireland and Scotland.” Fixing Ireland probably means trying to put out whatever fires the Brexit fiasco will trigger along the Ireland-Northern Ireland border. I’ll defer to Boris Johnson, England’s cabbage patch Trump, to figure that one out. As for Scotland, that’s easy: get rid of the Trump golf courses. You’re welcome. Finally, Ancestry.com says I’m ten percent Native American. If I choose that one, I can stay here and fix things. That sounds good. The first thing I’ll to do if I have to fix my ancestral home is turn the tables on Trump and tell him that he should go back to where he came from. “Mr. President,” I would say, “go back to where you came from.”
In other words: go to hell.
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© 2019 by Mike Tully
24 Seconds
When the Fort Wayne Pistons beat the Minnesota Lakers in a National Basketball Association game on November 22, 1950, the Pistons’ leading scorer was guard Johnny Oldham, with five points. He made only one field goal – and tied for the team lead. The Pistons won 19 to 18, the lowest scoring and arguably most unwatchable game in NBA history. Low-scoring, grinding games were common at the time. A few weeks later, two other NBA teams played six excruciating overtimes. Only one shot was taken in each overtime period because teams would inbound the ball, then hold it for a last-second shot.
The preceding paragraph takes about 24 seconds to read. That’s how long NBA teams now have to shoot the ball, thanks to Danny Biasone, owner and founder of the Syracuse Nationals (currently the Philadelphia 76ers), and Leo Ferris, the general manager. They estimated that each team took about 60 shots in a well-paced, entertaining game. That computed to 24 seconds per offensive possession. The 24-second clock went into effect on October 30, 1954, when the Rochester Royals beat the Boston Celtics 98-95. It increased the pace of games, scoring, and, most importantly, attendance. Fans discouraged by the plodding style of play returned in record numbers, drawn by the excitement generated by the need to complete an offensive possession within 24 seconds.
In the 2018-2019 NBA season, the Oklahoma City Thunder and Sacramento Kings attempted the most shots per game, taking 1.6 field goals per 24-second possession between them. What if a team took 48 shots in 24 seconds? The game would be unwatchable, buried under a fusillade that could not be defended by the opponent or followed by the fans. Even Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors could not get off that many shots in 24 seconds.
Connor Betts did, but not on a basketball court. He did his shooting on a busy street in Dayton, Ohio. Dayton’s Mayor said the shooting spree lasted 24 seconds until the gunman was killed by police. Dayton’s Chief of Police said investigators found 41 spent shell casings at the scene. Since the shooting was late at night and triggered chaos, it’s certain that not all spent casings were found. Betts likely fired as many as 48 rounds. Nine people were killed and 14 others injured by high-caliber projectiles that screamed into their bodies. After 24 seconds Betts was shot dead by police. The good guys with guns were able to stop the bad guy with a gun but it took them 24 seconds to do it – possibly the longest 24 seconds in history.
El Paso and Juarez residents died at the intersection of weaponry and hate and Dayton residents died, apparently, at the intersection of weaponry and madness. Does your city or town have such an intersection? Mine does: a shooting at the intersection of weaponry and insanity that took six lives and injured a dozen, including former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Mass shootings are defined by the Gun Violence Archive as “4 or more shot or killed, not including the shooter.” Tucson had an earlier shooting, not defined as a mass shooting, that left four persons dead, including the killer, at the University of Arizona College of Nursing in 2002. That one took place at the intersection of weaponry and anger. My state, Arizona, has experienced five mass shootings this year, and we’re barely into August.
We hear a lot these days about the need for “gun control” measures that include extended background checks, a longer waiting list, “red flag” laws, and identification of those who are dangerously mentally ill and likely to do harm. But none of these are “gun control” measures – they are people control measures.
This is gun control: restricting firearms based on projectile size and characteristics, projectile velocity, frequency of fire, and magazine capacity. As each factor increases, so does the body count, because weapons that fire a fusillade of large, dangerous projectiles at high velocity and rapid rate of fire are designed to kill or injure as many people as possible. On the battleground, that’s called winning; on the streets of America it’s called societal suicide. Think about those “intersections” I described. There is a common factor: the weapon of war. That is the constant in mass shootings that must be the nation’s primary focus. It took same amount of time to kill and wound 23 people in Dayton as it took you to read the first paragraph.
Think about what it means to implement people control instead of gun control. As weapons of war continue to proliferate in our neighborhoods, people controls will expand. America is already becoming a surveillance state, with cameras common in downtown areas and many businesses. The prevalence of mass shootings means there will be more. And there will be calls for more police and security guards to “protect us” from the guns. The control-people-not-guns-formula logically results in a police state. That’s not hyperbole: Sean Hannity recently proposed establishment of a police state as a reaction to gun violence. “We could do this in stores, we could do this in malls, pretty much anywhere the public is,” he told his audience. “Courthouses. We could expand it out everywhere.”
Everywhere. That is the vision of the NRA and its minions like Hannity. Guns everywhere. Police everywhere. Cameras everywhere. Liberty nowhere. The logical conclusion of a policy that focuses on people control instead of gun control is a frightened population constantly under surveillance. Instead of one nation under God we’ll be one nation under a boot.
I don’t know what dark agency purchased the souls of Hannity, Trump, LaPierre, and others when they advocate for people control instead of gun control. All I know is we can’t be silent when it tries to purchase the soul of our nation.
© 2019 by Mike Tully
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