A Civil Society Cannot Tolerate The Inhumanity Of Humans

Robert Reich comments on the behavior a civil society cannot tolerate:

Many of us feel overwhelmed by the brutality and hatefulness around us — in Israel and Gaza, in Russia’s continued attacks on Ukraine, in mass shootings here at home, in the violence and hostility that erupted at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and continues to divide Americans, in Trump’s vicious lies and rants that fuel racism, xenophobia, and misogyny.

How can human beings behave so inhumanely? 

And how should we respond? What is a moral life in the face of such barbarism?

Civilization is the opposite of the state of nature. Nature is a continuous war in which only the fittest survive, and where even survivors’ lives are “nasty, brutish, and short,” in the words of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

A civil society doesn’t allow the strong to brutalize the weak. It doesn’t incite the weak to terrorize the strong. It doesn’t tolerate violence against innocent people, nor does it tolerate retributive violence. 

Without norms and laws preventing the stronger from attacking or exploiting the weaker, none of us is safe. Oppressors can ever be secure from the oppressed. Even the most powerful live in fear of being attacked or deposed. Terrorism always lurks in the shadow of brutality. 

No one can be truly free in a society considered by many to be unjust. There can be no liberty where brutality reigns. 

Our job — the responsibility of all who seek a just society and a decent world — is to move as far as possible away from hateful violence, toward social justice. 

This is often difficult. Sometimes it’s hard to find the root causes of hateful violence — to understand who has brutalized whom, to disentangle accumulated grievances and hostilities that may go back generations.

Nonetheless, our moral lodestar must be to end brutality. 

Every time the stronger bully the weaker, the social fabric is tested. If bullying is not contained, the fabric unwinds.

The bullies are white supremacists who make it harder for Black and Latino people to vote.

 

They are people with great wealth who use their money to lobby for tax cuts and government subsidies that impose costs on the rest of us. 

They are giant corporations that abuse their workers and drive smaller enterprises out of business.

 

They are members of a dominant religion or ethnicity who demean or seek to destroy other religions or ethnicities. 

They are powerful men who harass and debase women.

 

They are police who kill innocent Black people. 

They are the native born who denigrate immigrants. 

They are shooters who commit mass murder. 

They are terrorists who kill, rape, and kidnap innocent civilians.

They are governments that bomb and lay siege to innocent civilians.

They are politicians who use hatefulness and bigotry to build their political base.

Unless these bullies are stopped, an entire society — even the world — can descend into violence and chaos.

Our duty is to stop brutality and minimize human suffering. Our responsibility is to protect the vulnerable and hold the powerful accountable.

Trump must be held accountable.

Putin’s aggression must be stopped. 

Election-denying politicians must not be reelected.

Politicians who encourage white Christian nationalism must be rebuked. 

Pundits who fuel racism and xenophobia must be denounced.

Social media platforms that amplify hate must be boycotted.

Mass shooters must be punished. 

Guns must be difficult to obtain. 

Police who kill innocent Black people must be brought to justice.

Powerful men who sexually harass or abuse women must be prosecuted.

CEOs who treat their employees badly must be exposed and censored.

Billionaires who bribe lawmakers with campaign donations to cut their taxes or exempt them from regulations must be penalized, and lawmakers who accept such bribes must be sanctioned.

Corporations that seek larger profits by despoiling the environment must be blocked. 

Terrorists who murder innocent people must be condemned. Regimes that brutalize ethnic or religious groups must also be condemned.

None of this is easily achieved. Some will never be achieved. 

But it is the only moral stance worth taking in this troubled world. 

A Rich Nation Denying Refugees Help Is Inhumane

Recently, there has been a lot of media coverage about Haitian refugees at our Southern border. Sadly, it seems that the majority view is that these refugees should not be admitted to our country. Too many Americans view these refugees as somehow different from us, and letting them into the country would somehow hurt the country.

This is not the only refugee crisis that has evoked this kind of feeling. Refugees from many other parts of the world have been denied entry, and many even think they do not deserve our help in any way. They are wrong.

Who are the refugees. In spite of what many think, refugees are people just like us. Most of them had jobs -- they were construction workers, sales people, lawyers, bankers, nurses/doctors, and many other professions. But something happened -- a natural disaster, war, or pogrom -- that destroyed their lives, and made it impossible for them to rebuild their lives where they lived. Others never had a chance to build a life because of discrimination or extreme poverty.

They are not trying to get anything for free or hurt the country. They just want a chance to rebuild their lives, and they are willing to work hard to do that. They will be good citizens and good neighbors if just given the chance.

Most religions, especially christianity, teach that helping the unfortunate is required. That makes it rather surprising that many of those who are not critical of refugees and most refusing to help them are religious people. Religion teaches to share what you have with those who need it, but too many have a different attitude -- it's more like, "I've got mine, so screw you!".

Refusing to help refugees shows an astounding lack of humanity. The refugees are not the monsters trying to hurt the country. The people refusing to help them are the inhumane monsters, especially in this country (built on welcoming immigrants and refugees). 

In a country as rich as ours, this is inexcusable. We should be better than this!

Trump's New Policy Takes "Cruel & Inhumane" To New Level

It's been obvious to decent people that Trump's immigration policy is cruel and inhumane -- especially regarding immigrants seeking asylum. He seems to believe that cruelty will convince brown-skinned immigrants to not come to the United States -- even though they are doing so to save their lives in many cases.

Now he has taken that cruel and inhumane treatment to new and dizzying heights. He is deporting immigrants who have come to this country to receive life-saving medical treatment -- treatment they cannot get in their country of origin. That deportation is nothing less than a sentence of death.

That's right -- Trump is now killing people to show his racist base how much he hates brown-skinned people (including children)!

Here is how MSNBC reports Trump latest cruel policy:

On MSNBC Tuesday, Rachel Maddow reported on the Trump administration's abrupt ending of the "medical deferred action" program that allows non-citizens to remain in the U.S. to continue receiving life-saving treatment. Families in this program are now being given 33 days to leave the country.

A growing number of families with sick children are receiving notices from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as part of a recent policy change, attorneys said Monday. They are being told that the agency will no longer renew any applications to stay in the U.S. under the  program.

Maddow profiled at least four children who are relying on U.S. medical care to stay alive, and who now have received letters stating they must voluntarily leave the country within 33 days.

“This is not something the Trump administration announced with great fanfare… they didn't make any public pronouncements about getting rid of this program... [But] they’re singling out the families of sick children to facilitate their deaths by sending them to places they can no longer get treatment," said Maddow.

Jonathan Sanchez, who has been getting treatment for cystic fibrosis in Boston over the past three years, is not sure what he will do if he is forced to return to Honduras. The 16-year-old spoke to radio station WBUR in tears, saying,  “If they deny the program, then I’ll need to go back to my country. I will probably die, because in my country there is no treatment for CF (cystic fibrosis)."

“We’ve reached the most inhumane of all of Donald Trump’s policies,” said  Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) at a briefing about the subject at an immigrant center.  

"This was a program that existed on the assumption there was some humanity left in the U.S. government," said Anthony Marino, immigration legal services director of the Irish International Immigrant Center, on MSNBC.

"I don't know how they expect people to pull children from their hospital beds, pull them from life-saving treatment, and go somewhere where they know the child is going to die… and if they don't, they’ll drag them through deportation proceedings."

Trump's Inhumane Border Policy Is Not Over Yet

(Cartoon image is by Matt Wuerker at Politico.com.)

Is the inhumane tearing of children (even infants and toddlers) away from their parents at the border over now? Not by a long shot. His rather suspect executive order just put a temporary hold on the situation, and provides an out for Trump to resume the policy (by saying their would be no separation as long as space was available). He is now going to federal court to ask that children be allowed to be detained indefinitely and be detained in facilities that cannot meet the minimum state and federal standards for youth facilities. In other words, the abuse continues.

Here is part of an excellent article in Time Magazine by Molly Ball:

It is a crisis Donald Trump created and always had the power to solve. At detention facilities across the country, children are penned in cages, crying out piteously for the parents from whom they have been torn by border agents on orders from Washington. Some children may never see their mother or father again.

In a presidency marked by serial outrages, the scandal over family separations at the southern border has been unlike any other. The President didn’t just say something offensive, he intentionally turned the machinery of the state on some of the world’s most vulnerable humans. He applied his signature approach–brutal toughness–to his trademark issue, immigration. He greeted criticism of his policy with mockery, falsehoods and blame-casting. He handcuffed the Republican Party and hamstrung understaffed federal agencies. All the themes of Trump’s character and Administration were embodied in this wrenching calamity.

At first, Trump embraced the outrage, as he so often does. Even as the pictures, video and audio began to trickle out of the detention facilities, and awful stories spread–a woman deported without her son; older children changing younger ones’ diapers–supporters predicted that Trump would stand his ground. . . .

But the images of young children sobbing for their parents created an outcry that neither Trump nor his opponents anticipated. Recriminations poured in, some of them from unexpected quarters. Evangelical leader Franklin Graham called it “disgraceful.” Former First Lady Laura Bush wrote a scathing op-ed. Even Melania Trump issued an unusual statement deploring the situation and worked her husband behind the scenes, according to a White House official. The President and his party faced a toxic scenario in an election year that was already looking grim. “It’s political insanity,” a top Senate Republican aide told TIME. “It will kill us.”

And so Trump did something he has rarely done as President: he backed down from the fight. At the urging of advisers, he signed an Executive Order on June 20 in an attempt to end family separations and instead detain children and parents together. . . .

The inhumanity unfolding at the border has not just been a test for Trump. It has been, and will continue to be, a moment of reckoning for America. Trump has often bet that if he just rides out the current frenzy, the anger will fade and some new controversy will erupt. He thinks shock is a temporary condition, moral outrage is phony posturing and that the American people can be numbed to just about anything. If there is a Trump creed, it’s that there’s no such thing as going too far. That may have found its limit with putting children in cages. But as his “zero tolerance” policy heads toward a seemingly inevitable court battle, the jailing of kids may become the jailing of families–and we will see how much American hearts can withstand. . . .

What happens next for the parents and children detained at the border is just as murky. The President’s Executive Order calls for families to be detained together, ending the separation issue but creating new complications. It is likely to be challenged in court. Immigrants’ advocates fear that his move could defuse the public pressure as family separations give way to family internment camps. And there is still no system in place to reunite the thousands of children and parents already separated from one another.

Whatever misery this mess brings will lay squarely at the feet of the President. But what price he will pay remains unclear. Trump was elected on the strength of some searing truths about the American political system–that Washington was broken and politicians of both parties were hopeless lightweights–and also some searing falsehoods, including that a frightening, inhuman foreign threat was to blame for the nation’s problems. He placed a cynical bet on the American character, that our capacity for empathy only went so far. The outcome of the humanitarian crisis at the border will be a test of whether that wager was right.