Saturday, July 14, 2018

The Cruelty of the Stupid

I accuse Donald Trump of child abuse and ask that he be tried in a California state court.

I don’t know how the laws on child abuse read, but I assume that if I grab a child and put it in a cage—even if it is my own child—I’ll end up in prison. To explain why this should be the case  I’ll turn to Oscar Wilde, who had observed children imprisoned in the jail where he did time. He noted that when a warder gave three small children cookies, he was immediately fired.

The quotations are from HARPER'S, August issue.

“Ordinary cruelty is stupidity. It is the entire want of imagination. It is the result in our days of stereotyped systems, of hard and fast rules, and of stupidity.”

Wilde wrote: “The child, consequently, being taken away from its parents by people it has never seen, becomes an immediately prey to the first and most prominent emotion produced by modern prison life—the emotion of terror. . . .To shut up a child in a dimly lit cell, for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, is an example of the cruelty of stupidity.” 


Wilde called for the severe punishment of anyone abusing children in this way. Trump should, if found guilty, be locked up.

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