‘She got ripped away from me,’ army soldier Matthew Blank said after his wife Annie Ramos was detained in Louisiana
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents under the command of the Trump administration have reportedly detained the wife of a US army staff sergeant at his military base in Louisiana amid his preparations to deploy.
The arrest of Annie Ramos, 22, took place last Thursday, just days after she married 23-year-old Matthew Blank, a soldier who has served for more than five years and previously deployed to the Middle East and Europe, the New York Times first reported on Sunday.
Ramos, a biochemistry student with no criminal history who also teaches Sunday school, had been subject to a deportation order issued in absentia in 2005 when she was an infant after her family missed an immigration court hearing, the New York Times reported.
Cognitive dissonance isn’t a skill, it’s a bias. Generally the way it goes is that the worse things get, the tighter people hold on to their existing belief.
Think about it like this: people living in a prehistoric village are suffering from a famine. Under a lot of stress, people start arguing with each other about what the group should be doing. One person is suffering from cognitive dissonance because they believe the group has the wrong idea. Now, should that person abandon the group and go off on their own? Or should they stick it out and just try to survive?
Evolution favours sticking with the group. Hence cognitive dissonance resolves into status quo bias. Now you might say we’re no longer in that sort of situation. That doesn’t matter actually, because our brains are basically the same as they were 10,000 years ago! We have all the same biases, it’s our environment that has changed so much.
So why is it different for you or me? Simple. We’re part of different groups than they are.