By As the old saying goes, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree…” Thanks for confirming the truth to that notion, Donald Trump Jr.!
If you haven’t see all the talk about Skittles recently, you may have been off the grid. It appears that Junior took to twitter to voice his opinion on the “Syrian refugee problem” – and it has left definitely left me contemplating whether ignorance is a gene passed on through birth in the Trump family.
The infamous tweet read, “If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful?”
Yes, the worth of a Syrian refugee has apparently come down to a pack of artificially fruit flavored candies that could potentially increase your chances of getting diabetes.
Before I go any further, can I play the grammar police really quick – because even in the most insane analogies I’ve read regarding the refugees, at least there has been consideration in how it was written. (Yes, even bigots on social media will occasionally take the time out to correct their grammar to get their point across, unlike Junior.)
Yes, the worth of a Syrian refugee has apparently come down to a pack of artificially fruit flavored candies that could potentially increase your chances of getting diabetes.
So, let’s first direct our attention to the grammatical error in this tweet. “If I had a bowl of skittles and told you just three would kill you…” is not a complete sentence! Common sense would define it as a dependent clause, which means that in the English language, a statement like that can not stand alone without a predicate to complete the thought.
Next, you don’t need to be a math prodigy to understand why eyebrows would be raised when noticing that the calculations in that meme are completely inaccurate. The number of Syrian refugees far exceeds the capacity of the amount of Skittles that can be held in a bowl.
To put it in a more visual perspective, it would take an Olympic sized pool filled with skittles to compare it to the number of Syrians seeking asylum in the U.S.
But more importantly than the above rant, we are forgetting a major point in Junior’s comparison: Syrians are human beings. They aren’t consumable products – things.
When we divide the world into categories, things and humans, conflating the two, you’ve essentially opened up Pandora’s Box of hate. You have dehumanized people in order to make it okay to shut down your ability to have compassion. You have created an opportunity to allow people to continue on their their divisive rhetoric against immigrants without the guilt. You have eliminated everything that this country was built upon. Once you have done that, where will it end? Today it is the Syrian refugees – tomorrow, who will it be?
…we are forgetting a major point in Junior’s comparison: Syrians are human beings. They aren’t consumable products – things.
Skittles aren’t my favorite candy but as far as whether or not I would take my chances and eat them just depends on the results of the presidential election. Of course though, I would throw away the orange ones because they do seem to have this disgusting affect of turning you into a hateful, misogynistic, unqualified, presidential candidate.
When we divide the world into categories, things and humans, conflating the two, you’ve essentially opened up Pandora’s Box of hate.
While the Trump family can continue being notorious for being hypocritical on rejecting immigrants into this country (as they are descendants of immigrants; and Donald Trump is married to one), the rest of us can focus on the economic benefits for this country that they would bring.
You have dehumanized people in order to make it okay to shut down your ability to have compassion. You have created an opportunity to allow people to continue on their their divisive rhetoric against immigrants without the guilt.
In a nutshell, accepting more immigrants into the America could potentially increase the housing economy by $68 billion, increase the economy by 4.8% over the next 20 years, and decrease the federal deficit over the next 20 years by $1.2 trillion. But Donald Trump Jr. seems to think that this “politically correct agenda doesn’t put America first.”