{"id":164,"date":"2015-08-04T19:23:00","date_gmt":"2015-08-04T19:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/?p=164"},"modified":"2015-08-07T02:05:05","modified_gmt":"2015-08-07T02:05:05","slug":"donald-trump-john-boehner-and-trouble-in-the-dominican-republic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/donald-trump-john-boehner-and-trouble-in-the-dominican-republic\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump, John Boehner, and Trouble in the Dominican Republic."},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t usually write about current events in this blog but a confluence of stories got me thinking about why it\u00a0has always been such a frustrating topic for me, whether in the newpapers or as a topic of dinner conversation. \u00a0It has to do with the importance of data, something I write about in the main website<\/a> as crucial to psychotherapy, even while we are being supportive and warm in session. \u00a0So please give a read and hang on through the end where I promise to tie it back into psychotherapy.<\/p>\n

Each year, thousands of Haitians venture east into the Dominican Republic in search of low-wage jobs in agriculture and construction and at the big all-inclusive resorts. \u00a0As always happens in such situations, greed and desperation conspire and tragedies ensue.\u00a0 People are stuffed into vans, paying about $100 each for the opportunity to travel like crowded cattle with sometimes barely room to breathe.\u00a0 Drivers of the vans have been known to throw bodies of the suffocated out onto the road.\u00a0 Haiti as we know has also been the victim of several natural catastrophes (flooding, hurricane, earthquake, cholera epidemic) and the country is struggling economically, to put it mildly.\u00a0 In the Dominican Republic, Haitians are often reviled and the victims of violence. \u00a0After homes were burned in one incident, the Dominican police chief who was reached for comment wondered if the Haitians had burned their own homes in preparation for leaving.\u00a0 In February of this year a Haitian shoe-shiner was hanged from a tree in a public park in Santiago while across town a crowd burned Haitian flags and shouted “Haitians out”.\u00a0 There have been other such lynchings of Haitians for the alleged infractions of burning a Dominican flag or robbing a convenience store.\u00a0 There are bars that openly refused to serve Haitians or allow them on premises.\u00a0 Dominican newspapers run cartoons depicting people of Haitian descent as bug-eyed, big-lipped, and babbling Spanish in heavy dialect.\u00a0 All of this goes back at least to 1937 when tens of thousands of Haitians and black Dominicans were murdered on the orders of Rafael Trujillo, then the dictator of the Dominican Republic.<\/p>\n

The Dominican Constitution is similar to that of the United States in that citizenship is conferred on anyone born in the country.\u00a0 The government, however, manages to find loopholes to this requirement and despite several rulings by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights the government continues to refuse papers and passports to anyone of Haitian descent.\u00a0 They argue that even families who have been in the Dominican Republic for several generations are considered “temporary”.\u00a0 Advocates for the rights of Haitians and Dominican-Haitians have worked under frequent surveillance and even threats.\u00a0 Meanwhile, in 2013 the Dominican courts passed a ruling revoking the citizenship of anyone in the country who they deemed born to “foreigners in transit”.\u00a0 Suddenly about 200,000 people were eligible for deportation.\u00a0 In the middle of last year, the government made a gesture towards rectifying this but it required that victims of the first ruling reapply for citizenship under rather onerous conditions, e.g. producing birth certificates and documentation that many people do not have.<\/p>\n

Recently there has been an outcry from the United States government, Amnesty International, the UN, Human Rights Watch.\u00a0 The government\u2019s deadline for reestablishing citizenship passed three weeks ago, and so far things have been quiet.\u00a0 It may be that international pressure has helped, however the government maintains that they are proceeding with mass deportations.<\/p>\n

And how has the government responded to that outcry?\u00a0 At some kind of summit meeting in Guatemala about a month\u00a0ago President Danilo Medina told the press \u201cWe\u2019re not going to accept false accusations of racism or xenophobia, which are baseless in a country that has been defined for centuries by the blending of cultures.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, president Medina simply denied reality.\u00a0 This is no surprise.\u00a0 People in the public eye do this all the time.\u00a0 There was a senator who tried to legislate the value of pi, <\/em>a number familiar to school children as the ratio between the radius and circumference of a circle.\u00a0 Its value is the same regardless of the size of the circle.\u00a0 Pi is 22\/7 or 3.14159.\u00a0 Measure any circle\u2019s circumference and radius and the former will always be twice the latter times pi<\/em>.\u00a0 Notwithstanding this physical reality \u2013 true everywhere on earth and at the other side of the universe \u2013 the senator in question tried to float a bill which would change the value to the more convenient 21\/7.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court recently passed a judgment that the Environmental Protection Agency violated the law when it imposed a multibillion-dollar regulation on power plants.\u00a0 Texas Governor Greg Abbott leapt on this development and continued to lambaste the EPA for doing its job “with little regard for the price tag these regulations would impose”.\u00a0 He ended his statement with the rallying cry that “Texas will stand ready to continue our fight against an overbearing federal government that stands in the way of economic prosperity”.\u00a0 U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner similarly decried “the damage that the EPA has already caused by shutting down power plants and putting thousands of Americans out of work”.\u00a0 He applauded the Supreme Court’s decision as “a measure that would force bureaucrats in Washington to account for the impact of the rules they hand down”.<\/p>\n

This kind of rhetoric is what we have in place of information.\u00a0 When arguments are put in this way, in the absence of any data, we have no way of knowing what is true and weighing the relevant variables.\u00a0 Are power plants in Texas damaging the environment which will result in dangers to our health and in economic hardship down the road, or is the EPA an alarmist bureaucracy that unnecessarily imposes restrictions on economic growth?\u00a0 We will never know until we start discussing what was described in last month’s posting<\/a> as “the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be”.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump somewhat famously got himself under public scrutiny when he claimed that Mexico is sending their rapists, drug dealers, and other damaged human resources to the United States.\u00a0 In fact, research has shown repeatedly that there is no correlation between immigration and crime; in California immigrants are found to be underrepresented in prisons as compared with the percent of the state population they comprise; and United States born men are incarcerated at a rate two-and-a-half times greater than that of foreign-born men.<\/p>\n

Those reading this article may have no trouble seeing how futile and empty the words of the Dominican President, Donald Trump, and John Boehner may be, how unsupported and thus ultimately irrelevant their voices are in the absence of data.\u00a0 So why, one may ask, has this article been written?\u00a0 Because we are not listening to the data!\u00a0 In fact, Donald Trump\u2019s standing in the polls has not been hurt or apparently in any way affected by the fact checking and databased counter arguments that have been presented.\u00a0 In short, we seem to be ignoring the data in favor of the posturing.<\/p>\n

This kind of profound disregard of reality can be common, of course, in the psychotherapist\u2019s consulting room.\u00a0 Last month<\/a> we discussed victims and perpetrators of domestic violence as an example of people who rewrite history to suit their preconceptions and emotional needs.\u00a0 But at least in the therapist office, there is hope that careful diagnosis will ferret out the truth.\u00a0 Many children are brought to a psychologist with suspicion of an attention deficit or a school phobia.\u00a0 Exploration of the child’s behavior, functioning, and other such details often reveal that the problem is neither of these.\u00a0 People frequently call psychologist offices and request one form of therapy or another, before they even really know the specifics of their problems and what kind of treatment would in fact work for them.<\/p>\n

Ignoring of the world as it is in favor of how the speaker wants it to be \u2013 or has been conditioned to see it \u2013 can be addressed and ameliorated in psychotherapy; sometimes a good \u201creality check\u201d from friends and family will suffice.\u00a0 The phenomenon becomes more frightening and dangerous when it is committed by those in power as discussed above.\u00a0 It is also scary that it seems to be growing more commonplace and even accepted.\u00a0 When Loretta Lynch was being considered for her current post as U.S. Attorney General, she was asked in an interview with National Public Radio whether an American citizen or an illegal immigrant was more entitled to a job in this country.\u00a0 Her answer was that everyone in this country should work; she said nothing more.\u00a0 Here again is a noble sentiment that in such vague terms evades the issue and sounds irresistible, similar to describing an antiabortionist as \u201cpro-life\u201d and the opposition as \u201cpro-choice \u2013 put in those terms, most people are pro-both.\u00a0 But in the process, data are ignored and the speaker evades reality.\u00a0 Ms. Lynch ducked the issues being raised, at least one of which was that given the limited jobs that exist in this country who should get first crack at them?\u00a0 As with the public\u2019s response to Donald Trump’s words, it appears that National Public Radio was unaffected by this evasion; they did not challenge Ms. Lynch to actually respond to the question.\u00a0\u00a0 One can\u2019t help but wonder how Mike Wallace or the other original \u201c60 Minutes\u201d reporters would have handled such an interview.<\/p>\n

(This article was written for another website which has me writing about current events; they rejected it as being too incendiary, too critical of governments. \u00a0What do you think? \u00a0I say all I quoted here was data taken from current events; I say I did not criticize governments any more than Monty Python’s Life of Brian<\/em> criticized religion. \u00a0But that’s for another entry.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t usually write about current events in this blog but a confluence of stories got me thinking about why it\u00a0has always been such a frustrating topic for me, whether in the newpapers or as a topic of dinner conversation. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":168,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions\/168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}