Losing Our Humanity

This piece is part of Yellow Scene Magazine’s Opinion section. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent a reported news position. At Yellow Scene, opinion pieces speak freely, challenge assumptions, and say the quiet parts out loud.

We are not only losing our democracy, we are losing our humanity.

A recent New York magazine article is among the pieces of necessary journalism capturing the wanton cruelty visited upon children, women and men by masked ICE agents and other deputized thugs. This piece wields its power through images – exquisitely unbearable. You should look, if you can bear it.

Fear and despair are etched on faces, mainly brown and Black. It has always been so. It is easier to dehumanize brown and Black people. It is the ugliest truth of systemic and unrelenting racism.

I don’t write to dissect immigration policy or weigh in on the manifold complexities of race and class. There is something far more horrifying running through us. We are losing, or have lost, our capacity to feel the consequences of what is being done by us and to us.

Gradual numbing and normalization glaze moral vision. It has been going on for all of human history, but seems at a new, generalized level of anesthesia in the United States. Our political leaders and a sizable plurality of citizens are only temporarily discomforted by our complicity in blowing Palestinian children to bits in Gaza, cavalierly exploding boats in the Caribbean, or tearing screaming brown children from their parents’ arms and shelter beds in Chicago. Worse, if such a bland adverb suffices, is that many men – and they are mostly men – appear to enjoy the process and the product. Indifference or enjoyment are co-equal exhibits of raging anger or deep sociopathy.

Distance offers no excuse. The masked monsters who throw women to the pavement or manhandle terrified children are directed or enabled by men and women in fancy suits and suites who justify the cruelty without so much as a single teardrop. They are as guilty of war crimes and urban felonies as a psychopath who hires a hitman to kill his wife.

These images of real-time socio-pathological violence are deeply unsettling, but just the tip of America’s frigid indifference to the suffering of children, here and abroad. We seldom see pictures of the tens of thousands – or more – of malnourished children who depended on USAID to cling to life. How are the actions of American leaders different than snatching pieces of bread from the bony hands of starving children? Is it less vile if we don’t see it?

An estimated 50,000 children under age 5 die from preventable malaria each year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria is agonizing, often ending in coma and death from multi-organ failure. Our abandonment of just one such child is a profound moral failure.

Groups of smiling white men – Donald Trump, Russell Vought, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Mike Johnson, et al – slash budgets and agencies, killing brown children as surely as if they slashed their throats.

I’ve often ridiculed the idea of American Exceptionalism. I was wrong. We are exceptionally cruel, exceptionally arrogant, and exceptionally calloused. Even before the needless government shutdown, resources for the most vulnerable among us were being withheld under the American doctrine of “you get what you deserve and deserve what you get.” In a matter of days things will get exponentially worse as Trump golfs, preens like a vainglorious baboon and takes literal and metaphorical wrecking balls to our shared history.

No Kings Day was necessary but wholly insufficient. Every day we should line the streets and the empty halls of Congress with images of the pain being inflicted on the world’s children – and our own – with our silence as proxy.

I can’t – or perhaps don’t want to – believe that all ICE agents and other officials derive pleasure from watching other humans cower in fear or scream at the terror of losing a child. Instead of blind obedience, we need civil disobedience. I know and understand the objections to comparing our authoritarianism-lite to the rise of the Third Reich. But the difference is in scale, not nature.

Are there no people of moral courage in the chains of authority? Can no military man say, “No sir, I will not fire on a boat in international waters.” Can no government agents step in front of a helpless family and say, “You cannot do that to a child.” Have we lost all ability to see our own children and grandchildren in the terrorized or emaciated faces created by our actions and inactions?

Preserving our democracy and preserving our humanity go hand in hand. If we save one, the other will follow.

But we cannot, must not, look away.