Homeland Insecurity

English: World Trade Center, New York, aerial view March 2001. Français : Le World Trade Center à New York. Vue aérienne datant de mars 2001. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the 16th anniversary of the day when planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington and a field somewhere in western Pennsylvania, which collectively killed around three thousand people, America has become more insecure than ever.

We don't hear much these days about the Islamic State or Al Qaeda planning attacks in this country like the ones in Europe that were attributed to them.  But we don't just need those guys to instill fear in the hearts of Americans.  Plenty of other 'threats' to the so-called "homeland" are coming up to join them:

Homegrown Terrorism  With President Donald Trump's tacit approval, hate groups like neo-Nazis, the KKK and other white nationalists are allowed to flourish because he considers them "very fine people".  Does this mean it is now open season on minorities, women, gays, lesbians, transgenders and anyone else who's not in lockstep with the new fascism?

North Korea, whose attention-seeking dictator Kim Jong-un has allegedly exploded a hydrogen device, shortly after tossing a test missile over Japan.  It would be nice if Kim responded positively to such things as economic sanctions and global isolation, but that's not happening.  It also doesn't help that Trump is making threats of his own, putting the rest of the world in nuclear peril.

Children of Undocumented Workers, who are currently going to college, serving in the military and otherwise involved in gainful employment as de facto citizens of the United States.  That is, until the President announced his intention to phase out DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), a Barack Obama-era executive order that legitimized all those now-grown-up offspring of undocumented parents, who apparently had the foresight to cross the border from Mexico long enough to make sure their newborn kids became U.S. citizens.  This is really the fault of our laws, which stipulate that anyone who was born here is automatically an American.  Which comes at the expense of all those who have waited years to enter this country legitimately only to see this going on.

In a sign that the President is having second thoughts about what he just did, he's turned the matter over to Congress, where he gave them six months to turn DACA into law.  Given Congress' track record on legislation in the past few years, good luck with this one, Dreamers.

President Trump, as much as he wants to make America great again, is proving to be just as much a real-or-perceived security risk as anything else we've mentioned here.  He and his cronies are under investigation for his alleged pre-election dealings with Russia.  He speaks (and tweets) before he thinks.  He doesn't get along with the leaders of his own party, let alone the media.  And, well, you know the rest.

The people who died on a September day in 2001 were just going about their business, not knowing they would help usher in an era of war, racism, violence and fear.  They also didn't know there'd be years of extreme political partisanship, resulting in a President who's a threat to national stability and world peace.  It's up to us to prove their deaths were not in vain.