These are the times when I weep for the heart of my country. We have teargassed barefoot children.
Compassion as a principled value of the United States, like much of the story of ourselves we present to the world, has always been more a characteristic of Yankee bluster than a sincere representation of our behavior. Less than a century after we made it unconstitutional to own and enslave human beings, we turned out endangered refugees and sent them to their deaths. We imprisoned honest Americans in concentration camps simply because of their culture and ethnicity.
We like to think that those were detours on our evolving red, white and blue journey toward creating and maintaining a more loving and peaceful world, one to which we believed we were wholly committed, and certainly more committed than any other powerful and influential culture on this planet. The truth is that any unbiased assessment reveals our commitment to co-creating a better planet is a recent and quite unrooted part of our national persona, despite our claims to the contrary.
All of that would be okay, if we could claim our stumbles have merely been missteps, because you cannot make giant strides without occasionally having to find your footing. Unfortunately, when the ground you have laid to march upon consists of the pitfalls of black slavery and white privilege, any attempt at traversing it requires taking steps that look more like distracting dance moves than an aspirational march toward a noble goal. Two steps forward, one step back, with a hitch in Uncle Sam’s hip on the change, as if it were part of a planned choreography.
It is one thing when we attempt to pull one over on the world; it is quite another when we lie to ourselves.
Here is the hard truth: The United States of America is, historically, not a welcoming country, and most Americans – regardless of originating culture - see no need to change that. Compassion is reduced to an ideal more akin to sympathy, and there is no impetus to answer a call for urgent action. After all, there is no greater comfort than not having to do any more than your neighbor is willing to do. If they are not going to lift a finger, we feel alright about shrugging our shoulders and turning our backs on the suffering, as the light of our collective compassion dims.
People are reacting with shock over the recent teargas attacks on the Mexican border near San Ysidro, California. It is likely genuine, given the images of frightened faces of mothers and their diapered children fleeing the assault by the border patrol. But if you give it a second, you can hear the rationalization kicking in. They were warned. They had it coming. They stormed U.S. law enforcement, and officers did their jobs to protect the border.
With that, it is time to say a eulogy for American compassion, if it were ever alive at all. The dreams of Baby Boomers, witnesses and activists in the human rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, was just that – an abandoned dream. At least Barack Obama tried to revive it with a strong dose of “hope.” Trump dashed both the hope and the dream – tin soldiers and Donald Trump coming, to paraphrase Neil Young.
Still, the illusion is out there. We told the world we were ready, and that people like Trump are an archaic aberration in Twenty-First Century America. We told the world to trust us, that we can handle racists and nationalists. It does not look like we quite comprehend how much work there is still left to do.
I have tried to explain away the 2016 election as the last gasp of the ugliest part of American society, a rat trying its damnedest not to be drowned by inclusivity and equality. While that may yet prove to be the case, we have a responsibility to be who we say we are to the world, including and especially to the barefoot babies and mothers who risk everything to seek help from the United States of America. If you do not open your eyes to see the desperation and open your ears to hear the cries, you will never open your heart to understand the suffering.
Stand with the refugees because it is the loving and compassionate thing to do. I hope that one day, it is also the American thing to do.
PBG