The Week USA - 30.08.2019

16 NEWS Talking points

Baron Wolman/Getty, AP

QMore than 300 people

commit suicide each year

in American jails—25 per-

cent within the first

24 hours of incarceration

and half within two weeks.

About a third of deaths

inside jails are caused by

suicide, partly because

people are reacting to the

shock of incarceration.

People awaiting trial or

serving short sentences are

housed in jails, while con-

victs are held in prisons.

Vox.com

QWhen President Trump

held a rally at a Royal

Dutch Shell petrochemical

plant outside Pittsburgh

last week, the union gave

workers two choices: At-

tend the rally and get paid

time and a half or take the

day off without pay. “No

yelling, shouting, protest-

ing, or anything viewed as

resistance will be tolerated

at the event,” one contrac-

tor told its workers at the

site in a memo.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

QPresident

Barack

Obama and

Joe Biden

spoke at

least half

a dozen

times before the former

vice president launched his

own presidential cam-

paign. “You don’t have

to do this, Joe, you really

don’t,” Obama told Biden.

Nevertheless, Obama has

continued to informally

advise Biden’s campaign.

The New York Times

QThe parents of Dayton,

Ohio, mass shooter Con-

nor Betts apologized for

publishing online an “in-

sensitive” obituary of their

son that made no mention

of the massacre that left

nine dead, but described

him as “a funny, articulate,

and intelligent man with

striking blue eyes and a

kind smile.” The obituary

has since been removed.

The Washington Post

Woodstock: 50 years later, what did it mean?

Woodstock “was the high point

of the 1960s counterculture,” said

David Colton in USA Today, and

for those of us who were there, it

“remains as real” as the moment

when the skies opened as Joe

Cocker finished “With a Little

Help From My Friends.” The

conditions for the 400,000 of us

hippies who swarmed over Max

Yasgur’s 600-acre farm in “ticket-

less anarchy” were horrible, with

insufficient food, clogged portable

toilets, and three torrential down-

pours that turned the alfalfa field

into “a clingy, blob-like mud.”

Miraculously, everyone got along.

Huddling for warmth, people slept

“together in the woods along the

‘Groovy Way’ path, whether in relationships or

not,” and grooved—high or not—to incredible

performances by Janis Joplin, the Band, San-

tana, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, and Sly and

the Family Stone. “The crowd, the people, us, it

turned out, was to be the story—sharing, danc-

ing, chanting, skinny-dipping, surviving.”

I don’t want to rain on anyone’s “sunlit memo-

ries,” said Anthony DeCurtis in the New York

Daily News. But 50 years on, it’s pretty clear that

“getting back to the garden,” as Joni Mitchell

wrote in her song “Woodstock,” was always

going to be “far more compli-

cated than the era’s hippie fan-

tasies implied.” It seems we’ve

had nothing but trouble since

those magical four days: endless

war, division, greed, terrorism,

and tumult. Woodstock wasn’t a

movement, said Gene Seymour

in CNN.com. It was a three-

day miracle of peace, love, fun,

and great music. Let’s recognize

Woodstock for what it was: “a

series of accidents that somehow

coalesced into something that

may never be duplicated.”

You should have been there—at

Woodstock 2019, said Christo-

pher Maag in the Poughkeepsie

Journal. This year’s 50th anniversary concert in

Bethel, N.Y., near the site of the first one, was

a reunion of old hippies. Only this time, “the

crowds waited patiently to pass through metal

detectors” instead of crashing the fence for free.

They traded the mud and LSD for orderly rows

of lawn chairs and glasses of rosé. They slept

at comfy hotels. One guy—Rhode Island prep

cook Bruce Mallo—still found the spirit to dance

through the crowd with his “arms weaving

seductively” above his head. Then Mallo jokingly

yelled, “I can show you my Medicare card!” A

rebellious generation, it seems, has mellowed out.

Noted

Sorry, Emma Lazarus, it’s time for a rewrite, said

Zak Cheney-Rice in NYMag.com. Her 1883

poem, “The New Colossus,” inscribed at the

Statue of Liberty’s base, famously reads “Give me

your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearn-

ing to breathe free”—a “welcoming” message on

behalf of a nation of immigrants. But last week,

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizen-

ship and Immigration Services, announced a new

rule barring green cards to legal immigrants who

get any public assistance—even Medicaid—and

proposed an update: “Give me your tired and

your poor...who can stand on their own two

feet.” Cuccinelli clarified that when Lazarus wrote

“wretched” masses, she was thinking of “Euro-

peans” who weren’t really all that poor. In other

words, nonwhite people from “s---hole” countries

need not apply. Cuccinelli is ignoring his own lin-

eage, said Dave Goldiner and Laura Nahmias in

the New York Daily News. His great-grandfather

was a dirt-poor Italian laborer who arrived “with

no education and little or nothing to his name.”

All that separates the Cuccinellis from today’s

black and brown immigrants “is time.”

Asking immigrants to stand on their own feet is

hardly “un-American,” said Kyle Sammin in The

Federalist.com. In 1882, Congress passed the first

major immigration act, which declared that “any

person unable to take care of himself or herself

without becoming a public charge” shall not be

eligible for immigration. Subsequent immigration

laws left the public charge doctrine “essentially

unchanged.” The Trump administration simply

wants to make sure immigrants granted legal

status aren’t coming here to be on the dole. Fortu-

nately, most immigrants come “looking to work,”

not to collect handouts.

When Lazarus wrote her poem, said Esther Schor

in The New York Times, the “wretched” immi-

grants were Eastern European Jewish refugees,

who streamed into New York Harbor amid fears

that an “army of Jewish paupers” who didn’t

speak English would burden America. Lazarus

argued through her poem that “aiding the poor

and oppressed of all lands was the mission of

America.” The ethnicity and skin color of immi-

grants may have changed since 1883, said Daniel

Fried in CNN.com, but their spirit is the same.

“Immigrants who walk 2,000 miles to reach our

southern border” and “take jobs in poultry plants

at minimum wage or less,” are quite capable of

“standing on their own two feet.”

Immigration: Don’t give us your ‘wretched’

The crowd was the story.