Disposed to Suffer

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.