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One Bad Reason to Hate Trump – Article by Sarah Skwire

One Bad Reason to Hate Trump – Article by Sarah Skwire

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The New Renaissance HatSarah Skwire
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99 Reasons, But the Name Ain’t One

I have 99 (thousand) reasons to hate Donald Trump and to find his campaign stomach turning. I won’t list them here. The Google graph showing the rising use of the word “bloviate” in American political discourse should stand in place of any detailed accounting.

bloviategraph

But what’s grabbed most of the attention since John Oliver mentioned it recently on his show, Last Week Tonight, is Trump’s name. As Oliver notes, “Trump sounds like money.” But, he continues in tones of shock and dismay, “It turns out the name Trump was not always his family name.… An ancestor had changed it to Trump from Drumpf.”

My family name wasn’t originally Skwire. It was Skwirsky. My grandfather and his brothers changed it — right around when Trump’s ancestor changed the family name — because back in those days, it was hard to get jobs in the United States with an obviously foreign name. Trump’s ancestors, I’m sure, did the same thing.

There’s no shame in being from places that aren’t America. There’s no shame in having a last name that’s unusual. And I am bothered by the pleasure we are taking in mocking a name that sounds a little bit funny and a whole lot foreign. It sounds like the kind of rhetoric Trump uses. So I’m not going to indulge.

However.

(And this is a very big “however.”)

I do think there’s something to talk about here, and I don’t think it’s funny at all.

The focus on Trump’s original family name is not analogous to the focus on former Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie’s ample girth. Governor Christie’s poundage was immaterial to his campaign. He has not publically bloviated about the need for the obese to stop being lazy, to start exercising, and to start eating right. He has not signed on to regulatory agendas like former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempts to control what and how much people eat and drink. He hasn’t, in other words, turned his weight into a centerpiece of his campaign.

Trump, however, has made immigration one of his central issues. Even those of us who have tried desperately to avoid the whole political season have heard that he wants a bigger wall along the border with Mexico, that he wants Mexico to pay for it, and that he would deport 11 million illegal immigrants in short order. A little research turns up Trump’s repeated references to immigrants as criminals, drug dealers, and rapists. Birthright citizenship is dumb, he opines. And the barriers to immigration should be towering, because, Trump says over and over, the people born here should be our first concern.

It’s not funny that Trump’s family name used to be Drumpf. That’s just a standard American story that most of us probably share. To be an American, for most of us, means we’re not really from around here.

But the idea that we might have an American president who thinks it’s fine for the Drumpf family to come to America and achieve unimagined success in a few generations, but who will do everything possible to keep the Rodriguez family or the Habib family from doing the same?

That’s a tragedy.

Sarah Skwire is the poetry editor of the Freeman and a senior fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis. She is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

#IStandWithAhmed Tells Us Something about Public School – Article by B.K. Marcus

#IStandWithAhmed Tells Us Something about Public School – Article by B.K. Marcus

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The New Renaissance Hat
B.K. Marcus
September 17, 2015
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There’s zero tolerance for drawing outside the lines.

“None of the teachers know what I can do,” said Ahmed Mohamed of Irving, Texas.

Does that sound ominous — or does it sound like any gifted 14-year-old reflecting on his public school environment?

Mohamed is a tinkerer. He makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart. He has a box of circuit boards at the foot of his bed. In middle school, he belonged to the robotics club, but it’s a new school year, and Ahmed hasn’t yet found a similar niche in high school.

So shortly before bedtime last Sunday, September 13, Ahmed wired a circuit board to a power supply and a digital display, and strapped the result inside a pencil case, hoping to show his engineering teacher what he could do.

Monday morning, his teacher admired Ahmed’s homemade clock. It was hardly his most sophisticated project, but more complex no doubt than anything Ahmed’s peers were doing on their own.

Ahmed’s engineering teacher admired the boy’s handiwork but added, “I would advise you not to show any other teachers.”

So Ahmed followed the advice and kept the clock in his bag — until another teacher complained that it was beeping during a later lesson, and Ahmed made the mistake of showing her his project after class. She told him it looked like a bomb and refused to return it.

A police officer pulled Ahmed out of his sixth-period class and, after questioning him in a schoolroom full of other cops, took him away in handcuffs.

“We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” said police spokesman James McLellan. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation.”

Why should this kid have to explain a clock?

“It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car,” according to McLellan. “The concern was, what was this thing built for?”

Because Ahmed is Muslim, and because Irving mayor Beth Van Duyne made national news over the summer making what have been generally interpreted as anti-Islamic statements, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has taken note. “This all raises a red flag for us: how Irving’s government entities are operating in the current climate,” said Alia Salem of the council’s North Texas chapter.

McLellan insists that “the reaction would have been the same regardless” of the student’s skin color, but the council is skeptical. Had a blonde Baptist boy brought a homemade clock to school, we would never have heard anything about it.

But is Ahmed’s treatment only a story about anti-Islamic hysteria?

“The concern was,” according to the police, “what was this thing built for?”

It was built to tell the time. It was built to impress an engineering teacher. It was built to help a talented boy find a place at his new school where he could fit in.

But it wasn’t assigned. It wasn’t sanctioned. Like Ahmed himself, the jerry-rigged timepiece doesn’t fit the expectations of the local powers that be.

The engineering teacher understood — and he warned Ahmed that no one else would. That tells us everything we need to know about the people responsible for Ahmed’s education.

B.K. Marcus is managing editor of the Freeman. His website is bkmarcus.com.

This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.