6 ms·
Living in a city that this administration has constantly been attacking forced me and my wife, as well as many of our neighbors, to put off our family growth pl
by throwawayohio 8mo ago
Living in a city that this administration has constantly been attacking forced me and my wife, as well as many of our neighbors, to put off our family growth plans. Not only did many of my neighbors lose their jobs, but others are simply fearful of living their lives.
We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might jump out and disappear our friends, family, or nanny who could be watching them?
And that is before we even get into the potentially disastrous child healthcare decisions and regulation rollbacks.
It's an unfortunate time to be trying to grow a healthy family, IMO.
ETA: I already have children.
- ryandrake 8mo agoMany of our family's friends have already left back to their home countries (bringing their own families with them). Risk/reward calculation has abruptly changed. The risk to your life and livelihood is not worth it, and the reward of living in the US has been steadily declining.
- mattmaroon 8mo agoThat is almost certainly the reason why they are making such a spectacle of it. Self deportation is the goal.
- CoastalCoder 8mo ago> Self deportation is the goal. Perhaps. GP didn't say whether or not there were any legal clouds over the persons he's describing. The answer to that makes a big difference to his point.
- ryandrake 8mo agoEvery one of them are legal permanent residents who don't feel welcome here anymore. Some are afraid they're one mistaken identity away from ending up black bagged and sent to El Salvador.
- mattmaroon 8mo agoIt doesn’t even matter anymore, being anything less than a full citizen puts you at risk. In my community, we have a bunch of Nepalese people whose TPS is going to expire and they are going to be deported. Not far away is Springfield, where a community of Haitians, who are mostly liked by the people in their community, and who even the Republican governor is asking the administration not to deport, have seen their TPS expire. There are a lot of non-criminals who are here legally, but still very concerned about their future. If I were one of the Haitians in Springfield, I would be looking for another country to take me in.
- thinkingtoilet 8mo agoThe goal is to rile the base and distract from the fact that there is no improvement in cost of living, healthcare, education, etc... tourism is down, farmers are losing their farms en masse, etc... It was trans people yesterday, Somalians today, and it will be someone else tomorrow. If that wasn't bad enough, it's clear the president and other powerful men (of both parties) were engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring. It's all a distraction and there are enough hateful Americans for it to work for now.
- OkayPhysicist 8mo agoIt's not "a distraction". It's serving their constituents. No good people support the Republicans, their primary voter base are just a bunch of hopped-up xenophobes who hate people who aren't like them because they've never met anybody who isn't from their inbred town. If anything, from a democracy angle it's almost admirable how committed to answering the demands of their base the Right is in America. Pedophile billionaires get their desires met, racist yokels from flyover states get their dreams delivered, the war hawks, all of them. We need to stop deluding ourselves into thinking "oh, the constituency on the right would be horrified if they just knew better". They wouldn't be them if they knew better. They are simply worse people, and the actions of the government are directly appealing to their worst desires.
- handedness 8mo agoOkayPhysicist wrote: > No good people support the Republicans, their primary voter base are just a bunch of hopped-up xenophobes who hate people who aren't like them because they've never met anybody who isn't from their inbred town. ... They are simply worse people... You should apply to the DNC to help with their messaging efforts, clearly they're missing an important voice!
- dpc050505 8mo agoThere's like what, 15 to 20% of americans actively trying to trigger rapture? You've got a lot of religious nuts in your country, and they really are bad people.
- insane_dreamer 8mo agoWe're now heading in the same direction -- will take more time than I would like to work it out, for various reasons, but this is no longer a country where I want to raise my kids (despite us being citizens and having the "right" color skin), and as much as I want to be hopeful for change it's really hard to see the damage being undone any time soon.
- reliabilityguy 8mo agoWith all due respect, but this extremely biased and US-centric view. IT was not easier to have kids in 2024 or 2023, both in the EU or US. Childcare is expensive, pace of life today (and the past 20 years at least) implicitly treats kids as a liability and a detriment to career progression and financial security.
- throwawayohio 8mo agoYes, this article is about the US. And I live in a place single digit blocks from multiple places where ICE agent behavior has made national headlines. I have no financial reservations.
- reliabilityguy 8mo agoSure, and I understand that. My point was that it was hard financially to have kids even before Trump was elected. Moreover, there are plenty of places in the US with no/little ICE activity, and it is still hard to afford kids today, a year, or three years ago. It has/had nothing to do with ICE.
- oklahomasports 8mo ago[flagged]
- throwawayohio 8mo agowhat an insanely insulting reply. this site sucks now.
- oklahomasports 8mo agoYou are anonymous. Weird to take such offense.
- gadders 8mo ago[flagged]
- watwut 8mo agoICE was arresting people whether they are citizens or not, whether they have legal status or not. They also beat people because they wanna.
- pbhjpbhj 8mo agoThey beat people because Trump and his regime want them to.
- neogodless 8mo agoGiven that I.C.E. has been allowed to stop people just for not looking white enough, and even white citizens have been shot for being "near" I.C.E. operations, I would suggest that it is not safe to assume someone is not a citizen, just because I.C.E. makes them feel unsafe in their neighborhood.
- andrewla 8mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- throwawayohio 8mo ago> If you claim to be changing your life in any way in response to this then you're just putting a fig leaf on decisions that you've already made. How insulting. Bad faith arguments have become way too prevalent on this site.
- epistasis 8mo agoAgreed. You are not alone, all of us see what's going on, and it only takes a few bad actors that are highly motivated to cause the craziness you see on display here. Regular, normal people are still in the majority, we just need to acknowledge each other and not let the propagandists flood the zone.
- mattmaroon 8mo agoI certainly don’t agree with the things the administration is doing, but this seems like just hysteria. You are putting off your family growth plans because they might deport a theoretical future undocumented nanny? It is strange to me how generalized partisan fear has become.
- matthewkayin 8mo agoDon't be ridiculous, talking about "partisan fear". They have taken away documented, American citizens without due process. When armed men can take you out of your home or your car and whisk you away without a judicial warrant and without due process, it is very reasonable to be afraid.
- a_better_world 8mo agoor just shoot you while you are in your car.
- mattmaroon 8mo agoIt’s really not. Define taken away. They’ve absolutely detained some citizens, then let them go. And again, not defending what they are doing, they are awful,but you are probably more likely to be hit by lightning than you are to have any of your family planning go wrong because of them if you are a full citizen. (If you are undocumented here right now, yeah, totally.) Hysterical people think they are being rational and stuff like this is exactly what they say.
- bigyabai 8mo ago> you are probably more likely to be hit by lightning I get that you're trying to rationalize this scenario, but this line is completely false. If there was a nation-wide wave of aviation terrorism, it would not be appropriate to say that you're "more likely to be hit by lightning" than risk your life in a plane. The situation has changed, and they're not being hysterical for observing the trends and adjusting accordingly. Lightning has a relatively static chance of hitting you. The likelihood of feds accidentally executing you in your hometown is on the rise, and we don't know when it will stop climbing.
- b0rtb0rt 8mo ago[flagged]
- WhompingWindows 8mo agoWhat a bizarre comment. Who cares about their genetic line? Are you evolution itself? Do you have stakes in making sure your genes make it to the future?
- b0rtb0rt 8mo agowho cares about their genetic line? literally every human being who has wanted grand children
- nancyminusone 8mo agoHm, seems greedy to me.
- throwawayohio 8mo agoA weird comment to make to someone who already has children, but I guess at least we can all be happy that my kids are being raised by parents that can read?
- MyHonestOpinon 8mo agoI am with you, it is a scary time. I have to remind myself that we have gone through worst times. My grandfather grew up in a ranch, at 22, along with his extended family and friends, they took arms and joined a revolution, they overthrew a dictator. They fought on the back of a horse for years. It was a rough life, but they endured, and here I am. Enjoying a life so comfortable that would be unimaginable for them. You cannot stop moving in life because things can go wrong.
- estearum 8mo agoEh, my grandfather lived through World War 2 and he was a lot less confident that "we have gone through worse times" than you are. Physical comforts are a small piece of the equation.
- GorbachevyChase 8mo agoIt’s nothing short of miraculous that medieval families raised their own children without cheap, brown labor to do all of the actual child raising.
- insane_dreamer 8mo agoNot to mention fear of a school shooting that would leave your kid traumatized at best and dead at worst.
- loeg 8mo agoSchool shootings are incredibly rare, and existed 25 years ago too.
- insane_dreamer 8mo ago> incredibly rare 312 shootings in the past 5 years [0] that's an average of ~ 1 shooting every 4 school days (across ~ 120,000 schools) that is not incredibly rare; you can try to rationalize it, but if you're a parent and your kid is going to school every day for 12 years, that's about 3000 opportunities for this rare event to happen to them If I'm computing this correctly, that's approximately 4 * 120,000 = 1 / 480,000 chance of it happening on any given day, or a 1 / 160 chance of it happening to your child in the course of their lifetime; compare that with a 1 / 15300 chance of getting struck by lightening over your lifetime, or a 1 in 800,000,000 chance of dying in a plane crash (this is according to Gemini, I didn't research these numbers thoroughly). And yet, look how much effort we put into airplane safety. > existed 25 years ago too sure, but it's so much worse: [1] 55 shootings in the '70s 80 in the '80s 157 in the '90s 121 in the '00s 260 in the '10s 312 so far in the '20s the fact that we know this has been a problem for 50 years and instead of doing something about it, the problem is actually getting worse. All so that some grown men can play with their guns (please don't tell me that it's about 2A ability to "resist tyranny"; that hasn't been true for a very long time) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000–present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(before_2000)#1990s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
- loeg 8mo agoThat 300+ figure (60/year) is including things other than mass shootings people typically think of as school shootings (e.g., targeted gang violence). There are ~74 million children in the US. Even taking your number at face value, it's 0.00000081 shootings per child per year. This is rare.