Lately, I've been thinking about
this Q&A at Zhul Library at NMSU I went to as part of my non-fiction
class. The event was held during Sunshine Week- a week celebrating transparency
and press freedoms- and featured three journalists and the spokesperson of the
Border Patrol in this region. The spokesperson had a somewhat unenviable job of
facing down a room of people in the wake of the stories that two children had
died while in BP custody. Touchy subject, to be sure, which the agent attempted
to get around by saying that Border Patrol is the immigration equivalent of
beat cops- they're the ones on the metaphorical street, the actual detention of
the migrants was handled by other parts of the federal immigration apparatus.
He did as well of a job as he
could, but, throughout the initial discussion of the panel members, I kept
getting a "I was just following orders" vibe from the intrepid PR
stooge and wondered how quickly the Nazi comparison would come once the floor
was opened to public questions.
As it turned out, I didn't have to wait long.
The first question from the public was whether the immigration
policies the administration was pursuing was moral, and what, if any concerns
the members of Border Patrol and ICE had in pursuing such policies. The
spokesperson's answer amounted to saying that the thing he most liked about his
job was that people were either following the law, or not. If they had proper
immigration papers, he wouldn't arrest them; if they didn't he would. He then
went on to say that the best part of his job was that, in effect, he didn’t
have to think about any of these things, he just applied the law. The man who
asked the question shot back with a comment about how that defense didn't work out
very well at Nuremberg and the room was off to the races.
I've been wondering how our
spokesmen feels now that 24 people have
either died in ICE custody or shortly after being released from it. I wonder if
he feels a little disheartened going to work now that the stories of how
children and teenagers are stuffed into bedless rooms where the children are
living in soiled clothes, with the teenagers in breast milk stained clothes
because there's no one else around to feed the baby's. I wonder if he rolls his
eyes a bit thinking about what he'll have to say when the government argues
with a straight face that taking away soap, toothbrushes, and forcing children
to sleep on concrete floors under bright lights satisfied the "safe and
sanitary" obligation of the Flores agreement. I wonder if he's been
thinking about what it means for him personally to go out into the world and
defend intentional policies of cruelty that kill people who wanted nothing more
than a chance for a better life.
Maybe I'm being too hard on our
Pontius Pilate spokesperson. It's not like he's defending an organization whose
current and former members- including his boss- are part of a Facebook group
celebrating the deaths of those children or making threats to Congresswomen who
criticize them; it's not like he's defending his fellow agents who made
unofficial commemorative coins to mock the children they're keeping in camps.
No, all he's saying is that he just represents the part of the system that
feeds people into the meat grinder, but because he doesn't directly grind
people into pulp, his hands are clean.
It's quite the abdication, but it's
not like he's alone. In response to Trump's "Go back to your own
countries" comment to four American citizens, Nancy Pelosi said well,
this:
I reject @realDonaldTrump’s
xenophobic comments meant to divide our nation. Rather than attack Members of
Congress, he should work with us for humane immigration policy that reflects
American values. Stop the raids - #FamiliesBelongTogether!
— Nancy Pelosi
(@SpeakerPelosi) July
14, 2019
Somehow, I don't think asking the
man who is purposefully creating a crisis that's killing people is interested in
making that crisis more palatable to his victims. It's almost, as if, the
cruelty is the point.
But what strikes me the most about that tweet is the “he
should work with us” line. To me, it speaks of an attitude that Trump isn’t
going anywhere, that he’s going to be president for the foreseeable future and
that, no matter what else she says, she doesn’t really see Trump as a
fundamental threat to anything because she’s not going to do a damn thing to
get rid of him. Instead, she wants to work with him, to mitigate his growing fascism
and the official discrimination that’s pouring out of his administration every
day.
Its cowardice masquerading as
political savvy which she’ll get away with because, well, why wouldn’t she? It’s
all she’s ever done, and she gets to be Speaker of the House, twice.
I took the title of this post from
the Declaration of Independence, which says “mankind [is] more disposed to
suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the
forms to which they are accustomed.” Nothing more accurately describes this
time and the reluctance to meaningfully confront Trump and what he represents beyond
pithy clapping. Tucker Carlson is running segments that Ilhan Omar is
representative of refugees who come to America because we accepted her, at
great cost, only for her to become an ingrate spitting in America’s eye. Sure,
language like that will spark a greater movement for ethnic cleansing and
xenophobia but you can’t impeach Trump or explicitly call him a white
nationalist because it’ll divide the country too much.
Even then, I feel like it goes so
much deeper. When Bernie Sanders pitched his plan to forgive all student debt,
the biggest push back came from people who repaid their loans who felt like the
plan was an insult to them, that it made all the suffering they went through to
pay their loans back meaningless. But, here’s the spoiler alert: if the only way you can
make your suffering meaningful is to perpetuate it on someone else, it was
always meaningless and unnecessary.
America is addicted to the philosophy
that freedom is only as good as the suffering you endure to achieve it. No
matter what it is, anything that would make life better is automatically
rejected because it would make people indulgent or devalue their freedom.
Universal Healthcare? No, it’s more important that people have the
freedom to choose health insurance policies that will abandon them to die than
for the government to ensure its people live. Welfare? That’s only for the lazy,
dependent, unperson. Never expect to retire? That’s amazing, it’s the ultimate freedom
to feel so insecure that you expect to be cast aside like trash the second you
stop working.
This attitude paralyzes us, drowning us in misery for no reason other than the suffering is point. It’s
the societal equivalent of those old self-flagellating priests looking to edify
themselves before their god. This brutality does nothing but
mutilate us into grotesque, pathetic, groveling creatures addicted to a ritual
of pain because its absence has become so foreign, we’re afraid to live in a
world without it.
The New York Times recently
had a story talking about a woman who, through a bureaucratic quirk, wasn’t an
American citizen anymore. She was born to two Americans in Canada, but because
of the way ICE is acting these days, she couldn’t get the documents she needed
to prove she was a citizen and spent a year in this legal limbo terrified of
being deported as a result of her, on paper
at least, non-citizen status. The kicker of it all was that she voted for Trump
and plans to do so again.
Just think about that for a second.
This woman gets the barest hint of
what it feels like to live in the existential terror that every immigrant, with
papers or without, experiences in the age of Trump. She got just a small taste
of what it feels like to know that the government could do whatever it wanted
to her with no consequence and her response is to make sure that keeps happening.
She said, “she continues to believe Mr. Trump will 'make America great again' and if that means thousands of people have to live their lives in fear or
people are thrown into concentration camps, then so be it.
This is what I mean. Even with firsthand
experience, this woman actively chooses to give power to the man whose policies
caused her so much stress because hey, it has to be somebody right? Somebody has
to suffer all those degradations, just as long as it’s not me.
That hypocrisy is what’s killing
us, that no matter which direction you turn, the fundamental policy question
isn’t how to improve society but “how can we impose the worst effects of the
status quo on the people who matter the least to keep it all going?” The only possible
result of all this is fascism, because if that is the central question of your
society, that’s really the only ideology with a ready-made answer. If you don’t
want to live in that, than you have to get used to changing the world in which
you are accustomed which, honestly, shouldn’t be too hard because the world to
which we are accustomed fucking sucks.
No comments:
Post a Comment