“This is not who we are.” I have read this countless times over the last month or so. When we find out Border Patrol agents are separating parents and children. Social media explodes with umbrage and post aplenty about how this isn’t how America. Then we find out the government seems to have “lost” over 1400 of these separated children. There was a hashtag #wherearethechildren that was all over Twitter…for about a week. Now, we have word that our government plans on building “tent cities” to house over 5000 children. Camps where we can warehouse these kids, many of whom’s parents have been sent off to prison uncharged of any crime. Outrage! “This is not who we are.” No, this is exactly who we are. THIS IS WHO WE ARE.
I grew up, thanks to my father, a student of history. I learned about WWII and the Holocaust very young. My exposure to the horrors men can visit upon one another happened when I was a child. I sometimes feel it’s a lesson most people my age and younger haven’t learned. We grew up in what was mostly peacetime. Wars were far away and weren’t anything you were exposed to unless you volunteered for the military. Unless you were from another country, you had no real understanding of what atrocities are. Those things happened in other countries. Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia…nothing like that could ever happen here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. We’re better than that.
The myth of American exceptionalism. We are the most moral and upstanding of people. As Reagan said, America is a shining city on a hill built and fostered by divine providence. Manifest destiny sent out West, killing and brutalizing as we went, ordained by God to seize whatever land we could see. We tamed the wilderness and created huge farms and great wealth on the back of slaves stolen from their homelands. Bought and sold treated like chattel to do the work these noble men would not. We have built a great nation for ourselves. For us. Let’s not mince words here. The exceptional American is a white American.
Yes, yes…melting pot. We’ve all heard this and it’s a lie. Sure we are a nation of immigrants, mostly European immigrants. I can say my foremothers are from elsewhere. German and Scottish mostly and you cannot get much whiter than that. My ancestors were welcomed with open arms…while at the same time the government was not allowing Chinese immigration at all. Immigration from Latin America has also been very tightly enforced once policies were set. As much as those on the Right would have you believe it, immigration in the US is tightly regulated. Our melting pot has a lot of one ingredient.
You see, when we think of the average typical American we think of a white one. Everyone else is different. The standard is white, it’s always been white. We’ve absorbed and accepted our own superiority and exceptionalism as fact. We’ve set up a whole system that benefits us (white supremacy). We created that shining city on the hill, to be enjoyed by those God has ordained rule it. This has been an undercurrent throughout our history. This unspoken and denied racist and supremacist ideology that is in the very bones of our nation has always been lurking. We, partly in a need to separate ourselves from the fascists we fought generations earlier, kept that in check. We were better than that.
We’re not. We’ve let a combination of economic uncertainty and propaganda create a fear of immigrants. Constant talk of our jobs being taken, of rapists and murderers pouring over our border, has been very very effective in tapping into that slow simmering racism that underlies our society. We are told to fear anyone different and to keep out anything we fear. Muslims are all terrorists. Latinos are all MS13 gang members, not even human but bloodthirsty animals threatening us. All are dangerous and it is imperative the government protect good (white Christian) Americans from these threats. Fear makes people sometimes do terrible things. If you think that’s not true, Google some Nazi propaganda about Jews and tell me if you don’t see some familiar themes.
Am I comparing America to Nazi Germany? Yes. We like to think that Germany was this huge country just FULL of Nazis. We like to think that Hitler only came to power and that the Holocaust happened because the entire country willed it. They all went mad. I used to think that. It had to be true, what else could explain so many people just sitting by and doing nothing? Good people would have done something, surely. I no longer believe that. I watch good people now as human rights are abused in their names…do nothing. I see no real protest. Everyone goes about their day to day because it doesn’t touch their lives. The government rips feeding babies away from their mother’s breasts and we stay silent. They aren’t us so we don’t care. We sit in silence and we are complicit in the terror being committed by OUR government. They all went mad. No, it wasn’t madness that created untold death and horror…it was apathy. For God’s sake, wake up.
The Cranky Buddhist 