When Will We Learn?

The agony of seeing what the people of this country have become grows worse by the day. The nation as a whole has always been what it is today – a land built upon oppression and exploitation – but the people have largely embodied the ideals that the power-handlers long overlooked. We have always been a compassionate people, an inspired people, a people full of wonder and hope, but we are now boldly embodying the bloodlust that has long defined the darker sectors of our nation, the sectors relegated to smoky backrooms in darkened corridors of the Houses of State or dingy warehouses where bosses take their atrophied workers to be executed in silence.

There is no excuse for the complete disdain for human life that now is a hallmark of American ideology – we can no longer even see the people at the ends of our weapons, only the fictitious threat they pose to our way of life; we no longer see children, we see unhatched eggs that will one day surely become villains set on our destruction; we no longer see the suffering, only the strength of our cold retribution. Surely, nothing is more woeful than a people lacking humanity aside from a people who have become unfit for it and undeserving of it.

By now it is common knowledge what is happening along the Southern border of our nation – families fleeing degradations of every kind are being doused with tear gas and pelted with rubber bullets as they try to eke out a better existence for themselves and, most importantly, for their progeny. While this is happening, the misanthropic apes moan on in the background about the rule of law and other such nonsense as if it means anything in the great epochs of human existence, as if it should even be visible to human eyes who can understand the yearning for something better, something more, something real, something secure.

I feel as though I’m writing the same editorial in perpetuity – three years ago I wrote a piece entitled A Cry for Humanity about the disgusting behavior displayed by Americans so weak in their self-proclaimed superiority that they would deny humanity to people fleeing the very same ills we claimed to stand against and it seems, with very little editing, I could have written the same piece today and, in a very real way, am. What a disappointment we are as a species, what a poor excuse for a civilization we’ve become – civilization requires civility just as humans require humanity and we are lacking in both, in ever increasing numbers and in ever more grotesque ways.

Perhaps it’s the father in me – when I look into the anxious, terrified and yet optimistic eyes of these children, I can’t help but see my own and imagine how it would surely feel to be a wounded wanderer wanting nothing more than something better. But as I consider it further, it is in fact the human in me that can see this so clearly – I need not the attachment of offspring to know want, to know suffering and desperation, and to know clearly that those ills deserve to be remedied just as quickly and efficiently and carefully as any other that now plagues this Human Hellscape.

The president of this nation is the most eloquent illustration of all that is wrong with this nation – a glutton and a zealot, an aporophobic monster the likes of which could only be conjured in the pages of some post-apocalyptic dystopian fantasy. But what is most disturbing about this humanoid dung beetle is the fact that he is little more than a mirror for the darkest and dirtiest corners of the American body, the places we thought were, for the most part, relegated to dimly lit avenues of history – not only is he a mirror for them, he is a magnifying glass for them and, as such, has served only to expand and empower them to terrifying new heights. And as some of us squirm at the sight of his hideous creations, wince at the realities that he and his ilk are creating with ultra-calm and wide support across the global sphere, we know only too well that there is little to be done to stop him for his coming has been foretold for ages immemorial.

He is us and we are him – if he is the rain then we are surely the flood and all of humanity is being drowned despite some of us striving to act as life preservers, to stand as firm and unmoveable ground upon which the stranded can take refuge. In fact, those who don’t willingly fall from the cloud are just as apt to drown as those unwittingly standing in the wake of the deluge, to be a preserver or a chunk of construction swept downstream in the murky, brown waters of nationalist fury and ignorance.

When will we learn that strength is not measured in the number of lives laid to waste beneath the heel of a boot? Strength is acquired through standing up to the wicked and standing up for the weak, in tiny ways every day for, likewise, it is the strong who can endure through a million tiny battles and remain undeterred. When will we learn that the courage to love is infinitely more precious and powerful than the courage to aggress? Surely, it takes no courage at all to victimize the weak, to make light of their despair and hold it overhead as some golden idol to be worshipped. When will we learn that those whose arrogance relies upon the suffering of others to be indulged is one unfit for membership in the Social Club of Humanity? When will we learn that those who shed tears for the trampled, who cry out for the desperate and weary, who wince at the injustices plagued upon the heads of their unknown brothers and sisters, are the mightiest among us and worth more than the net value of 100 self-centered despots ruling over 100 strange lands?

When will we learn? If not soon, then there will be little left of humanity to be saved and we will rightfully be served the rotten fruits we’ve planted and picked for so very long.