let me entertain you

It’s endlessly fascinating how guys like Newt Gingrich and other conservatives are so concerned and up in arms over “rights,” “liberty,” our Constitution, and “democracy.” Conservatives even managed to get an entire movement of white, middle to upper-class people to believe their “rights” and “liberties” were somehow being infringed upon by nonexistent socialism. What these guys don’t tell you is that the concept of liberty, which is applied to persons in our Constitution, only applies to them and people who look, think, and act like them. Only they are people worthy of fundamental rights and when the definition of a person becomes inconvenient to them, they change it. For example, in this country, corporations have more legal rights as “persons” than living, breathing people with flesh and blood who happen to be undocumented. These individuals, many of which have come here to escape the resulting horrors of the atrocities committed by the United States in Central and South America, are considered “unpersons.” Instead, we treat people who merely do not happen to have a few papers that denote them as citizens of the United States as dangerous animals because in this country, they are “unpeople.