LETTER: Wishes for 2026

Letter to the Editor:

“We Are All Immigrants”

by James C. Johnston Jr.

I am happy to see the back of 2025. It was an uncommonly ugly year. By uncommonly ugly, I mean that I have never seen so much unapologetic hatred visited by this nation on the world. Never have I seen so much nastiness directed at the American people by its own government. Our National Leadership has called certain poor countries on our very small planet, “S--- Hole Countries”.

I cannot envision Washington, Lincoln, or any other past president of the United States using such vulgarisms to describe what we used to call “Third World Nations”. Even that phrase was considered very pejorative not so very long ago, and it was decided that these disadvantaged nations would be better termed or referred to as “Emerging Nations.” By contrast, “Third World Countries” seems rather congenial to the ear after listening to this nation’s sometimes intemperate leader. I wish that he would remember that we are all immigrants unless we are Wampanoags or other sorts of First Americans.

Horrible lies have been circulated about some immigrant people of color stealing and eating domestic pets. Lies certainly which were shared even by people in high political positions who should know better. Individuals from nineteen nations have now been forbidden legal entry into the United States by executive order. Even individuals, who have passed all their qualifications for citizenship, have been recently removed from the venues reserved for their swearing-in ceremonies just minutes before the actual citizenship ceremony was to take place! The most monumental event of their lives was even denied them at the last minute, because they were from some country deemed undesirable by our esteemed chief executive.

This same president has publicly recently rhetorically asked why we can’t have more new citizens from “nice countries” like Denmark or Norway. Does he mean nice Caucasian immigrants instead of people escaping horrible regimes in those S--- Hole Countries even those who came here legally, and had met the requirements for citizenship?

In this Holy Christmas Season of the year, we have seen fit to attack the shipping and stealing of fuel oil of some nations and bomb African nations, like Nigeria and Somalia while alleging that we are protecting Christians from persecution when all the available evidence seems to be to the contrary. At the United Nations, our Chief Executive took credit for stopping a war between Somalia and Ethiopia. The representatives from those two nations seemed to be surprised that this had happened, because they had not been at war. This was puzzling.

Anti-Semitism seems to have taken on a new life during this last year. A record number of cases of anti-Semitic activity have occurred all over the country. It is also profoundly disturbing and shocking that a lot of young and old conservatives have been quoted as having rather high opinions of Adolf Hitler. Our Chief Executive has even stated that he wished that his generals were as loyal to him as Hitler’s generals had been to that authoritarian leader.

I guess that our president is unaware of the Graf, or Count, Claus von Stauffenberg and some very high ranking German Generals including Henning von Tresckow, and Hans Ostric, and other high ranking German officers and officials failed in an almost successful attempt to kill Hitler with a bomb at his Eastern Headquarters, The Wolf’s Lair, on July 20, 1944.

In fact, when hundreds of Generals, admirals and various high ranking officers were called to Washington for an important conference about personal hygiene, and weight loss, and personal grooming by the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth last summer, nobody attempted to do harm to our chief executive leader. Had he been aware of the history of disaffected members the German military leadership in 1944, he might have thought a good thing was a good thing that the Generals and Admirals just looked askance at one another wondering just why the Hell they were there in the first place. But I am afraid that our chief executive isn’t much of a student of history.

We now have something else in American National Life that we never had before. We have I. C. E. [ Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. Who would have believed that in 2025 the United States Government would have its own hooded and masked secret police attacking and dragging off people who were mostly minding their own business? Can such a Gestapo type police organization really be active in the United States of 2025? I guess it can!

Back in 1935, author Upton Sinclair wrote a book called It Can’t Happen Here. It was a dystopian novel about an autocratic régime set –up by a Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip who becomes President of the United States. Windrip is initially supported by crusading newspaper editors, like Doremus Jessup, who see Windrip as both a populist and patriotic nationalist. Eventually, it becomes obvious that all Windrip is interested in is the acquisition of personal supreme power over the whole country and the enjoyment of personal luxury that only great wealth or absolute power could provide.

Doremus Jessup becomes a critic of the Buzz Windrip Administration after seeing that Windrip has become a Fascist dictator. Windrip does not like critics and Jessup is tossed into a concentration camp as a traitor to the Buzz Windrip Administration. Eventually Jessup escapes from the camp and becomes a full-fledged rebel against Windrip’s Fascist Regime. I suggest that you dust off any ancient copy of this book and read it. If you cannot find a 90 year-old-copy, I am sure that you can find it through Amazon, and you can put this very modern classic on you Kindle. I am sure that you will find it a very interesting read.

Racism is also raising its ugly head in 2025 along with xenophobia, or a fear of foreigners. I have a very good Moslem Friend, who now works and lives in London, with whom I have Celebrated Christmas for almost twenty years. I also have Jewish friends with whom I also celebrate this universal holiday. My Jewish friends visited London this summer while on a European Holiday and spent the better part of a week with my Moslem friend as his house guest, because they have also become great friends.

My Moslem friend will not come to the United States since the new regime has taken power in January of 2025 as he genuinely fears deportation to some strange place or summary seizure or imprisonment in some obscure Southern Gulag by masked ICE Agents without the benefit of due process. Did you ever think that this sort of thing would ever happen here? Even citizens of the United States have been taken by ICE Agents from their homes in the middle of the night, handcuffed, thrown on the ground, and left to freeze in the elements for hours while detained out-of-doors!. Some other folks have been taken out of school, or captured while walking down the street, or taken directly from their college campuses, and seized while in many other public places. As a result, many people are afraid to leave their homes.

Students with valid Visas have been arrested and deported by masked agents in unmarked vehicles. ICE Agents have seized mothers with small children and have even thrown these unfortunate women to the ground in front of their kids, shackled these struggling women, and then dragged them away, and held them in strange places and improvised holding tanks without adequate facilities for personal hygiene. Many of these women are the wives of men serving in the United States armed forces! This has been my America in 2025, and sometimes I hardly recognize it. It certainly was not the America of 2024!

Most of the people seized and badly abused by agents of our clandestine government officials seem to have one thing in common. These folks don’t look like they were immigrants from Denmark or Norway. The fact is that they do not look like Northern Europeans. Does this fact have an influence on the way they are treated by ICE? There is something rotten in this “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave”. And it really is “Gross Un-Americanism” as I remember what it is to be American.

As a healthy society we used to recognize “Equality”, “Democracy”, and “Impartial Justice” as truly American values, and the right to have our civil rights respected has always been intrinsic to the fabric of our American Democracy. Now even judges are arrested from time to time if they look too closely into what is going down in this “Brave New World”. Even United States Senators have been thrown to the ground when asking questions of the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem. This was California, and the senator asking Noem questions was Senator Alex Padilla. Noem made no move to stop the government security from putting the senator on the floor and cuffing him. I guess the senator didn’t look Danish or Norwegian!

Back when I was a good deal younger, policemen were neatly uniformed and dedicated to the protection of the public as they still are. I am not quite sure that ICE is as well trained as are policemen. I suspect that they are not. Nobody really seems to know much about them. Before January 2025, there were no masked men jumping out of unmarked vehicles indiscriminately grabbing people and hauling them away to God-Knows-Where. That is the sort of thing was something that happened in places like Nazi Germany, North Korea, Russia, China, and in countries dominated by dictators, and military juntas.

Lately the Super Rich also have less taxes to pay, and the poor are going to find out what all of these fiscal reforms of Musk and his “Brave Young Men” and others will really cost them very shortly, not to mention what effects our chief executive’s tariffs will have on prices of goods we need to purchase not to mention imported foods. I guess that if you didn’t buy millions of dollars’ worth of the President’s crypto-currency, you don’t get face-time with him. By the way, how is that grocery thing going for you in 2025?

I truly hope that 2026 is a year that will bring about some needed changes in the quality of life in these United States. We need some love for our fellow man. We must at least embrace some real toleration of those who might not be like us. We must strive to understand and tolerate our fellow residents of this country, and we must not shoot our fellow citizens and residents of this great nation in a national spree of massacres. This pandemic of killing by guns must stop.

I am eighty-one years old. I have seen rather a lot of life. I have known a lot of young people. Young people are the hope of our collective future, and I have always had faith in them. It has been my experience that these kids are very good, and tolerant, and hard-working people. I have seen that each successive generation has been, in so many ways, more tolerant than the generation that came before it. I hope that this trend continues.

As far as our democracy goes, Ben Franklin once remarked, “We have a republic, if we can keep it.”

Winston Churchill once famously said, “Democracy is the worst form of government in the world except for any other kind.”

In 1883, Emma Lazarus wrote, in her poem, “The New Colossus”, honoring the new “Statue of Liberty” these words making –up the better part of her last stanza of her classic poem commemorating the huge sculpture of “Lady Liberty”, a gift from France honoring our practice of democracy, the following words:

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

These words are emblazoned on a bronze plaque inside of the ground level entrance to the Statue of Liberty. I think that it is well to remember, that unless you are a direct descendant of Native Americans, your people were once themselves immigrants to this nation. We must remember this vital fact of our own national origins, and we must be decent to one another now and in the New Year.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Despite many differences of opinion, I value Mr. Johnston's friendship and intelligence and his willingness to join me in mutual forbearance.  We both believe this is a healthy thing.  Although Jim raises many interesting points here, in the spirit of disagreeing without being disagreeable, I can't help but share that Niall Ferguson, a highly respected UK historian, writing just this week in The Free Press, takes a considerably more optimistic view of the state of our government and addresses the many anxious essayists who share Jim's alarm with, "I continue to regard such fears as hyperbolic."  I do hope Niall is correct.  A second small point. Some 75 years ago, the long ago administrations of Harry S. Truman and Dwight David Eisenhower quickly and firmly  tossed a good two million or so individuals of Mexican descent, some even citizens, out of the country without much controversy, except for the final act, the military-style Operation Wetback, with its clearly racist name. And, we might add, even earlier Roosevelt's New Deal included the forcible removal of about a million people of Mexican descent, many of them US citizens.  None of these things should be points of pride but they do provide some perspective for actions being taken in the present day.]