06/24/2018
As we approach Independence Day, I am reflecting on what our country is becoming. In 2016, I received back a letter addressed to a defendant by certified mail, return receipt requested marked not at this address, 11 years after its postmark. Last year, I sent a letter seeking approval of an agreed upon division of a civil service retirement in a divorce case in March of 2017 to the appropriate Office of Personnel Management address and received a response approving the retirement division in late November, 2017. There may have been good reasons for each of these unusual occurrences but from here they are hard to explain or understand. it contributes to the notion of a bloated oversized bureaucracy out of control but with massive responsibilities delegated to it by our Congress and past Presidents in the constitutional process of enacting legislation but leaving implementation to huge outsized unaccountable bureaucracies. I, also, believe that our borders should be secure but with a view that good people who lawfully come to this country, as have my ancestors, should find a safe and secure home in our "melting pot" but with the necessary level of scrutiny to protect our citizenry from the growing spread and mobility of terrorism. Each of these issues, the bureaucracy and secure borders, have gone from an intelligent application of a well-reasoned solution to political footballs which have led us to the current quandary in which we find ourselves where children are "caged" or whatever characterization may be placed on the current process of separating children of all ages from the parents of the illegal aliens apprehended entering this country unlawfully. Even if they are fed and housed as well as the children of the perpetrators of this unAmerican debacle, the emotional and psychological damage to these children is unwarranted and inexcusable. I will share with you a letter from an accomplished former legislator, appellate court jurist, a founder, and former president of the College of Charleston School of Law, whose published legal opinions as a jurist have always impressed me as does his letter which follows:
"William Henry Seward was Lincoln’s secretary of state all during the Civil War. Naturally, he was opposed to slavery, but he wondered whether abolishing slavery was worth the country going to war with itself. He thought the radical abolitionists had probably exaggerated the horrors they described. After all, the Southerners who came to Washington from such civilized places as Charleston were such consummate gentlemen. He could hardly believe they would seek to perpetuate the acts of cruelty the abolitionists said were a part of slavery.
So, he decided to take a tour of the South and see for himself. His wife went with him. They traveled from Washington by horse and carriage. Their journey had just begun when they encountered a lone horseman, a slave trader, trailing along behind him a dozen black children, chained together at their necks. They were little boys and girls, no more than 6 or 8 years old. They were naked, and they were all crying for their mothers.
Mrs. Seward became physically ill. Her husband turned the carriage around and headed back to Washington. They had seen enough. The bloodiest conflict in the history of the country followed.
We saw on television small children taken from their parents on the Mexican border. Like the little boys and girls encountered by William Henry Seward, they cried for their mothers. President Trump assured us that the way they were being treated was legal under the circumstances. So were the activities of the slave trader legal at the time.
Moral philosophers from Lord Acton to William Safire have reminded us that “the right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.”
Alex Sanders
As you celebrate our independence, reflect on whether the ideals we promulgate in our constitution and proclamation of Independence are met in our government's actions with these families or whether we are denigrating what we stand for as Americans. God Bless America.
