Why More People Need to Speak Out Against the Evil of Mass Deportation

We still have the power to prevent terrible crimes against humanity

Hardship teaches humility, and the United States is about to have a significant dose. The pain you put out into the world comes back at you tenfold. We need to be generous and tolerant, both for the world’s sake and for our own.

When I was a teacher in Peru, I worked in poor areas and I worked at private schools. There’s a stark difference between the behavior of students who come from poverty versus those those that come from money.

When I walked into a classroom in a poor area, the kids were always quiet and humble and respectful. In fact, they’d stand by their desks as I entered the room and wouldn’t sit until I gave them permission. Even though I told them they didn’t have to adhere to this practice, they insisted on doing it every day.

I came to realize I was doing them a disservice by telling them not to stand. Because even though I wouldn’t have punished them, once they left my classroom my influence would also end. If they learned from me that they had a right to sit down and not go through some absurd act of supplication that an ego driven teacher demanded, they’d be punished for it elsewhere.

I found that these kids were humble. These kids were hardworking. They would study hard because they saw education as a pathway out of poverty. Historically, that’s been true. But no matter how much you work and no matter how much you sacrifice, there’s never any guarantee. That’s particularly true when an authoritarian regime takes control and tightens the screws and makes it hard on everybody.

Authoritarian regimes demand all the profits for an elite few, and they don’t even try to stop the inequitable distribution of wealth. Children who are raised in poverty are expected to supplicate themselves in absurd gestures of respect. They’re expected to be humble, and hardworking, and to never complain.

In contrast, the kids at private schools that came from money were different. I have affection for all of my students. Of course I appreciated that the rich students felt empowered to express themselves. But from a day-to-day standpoint, I did miss my students who would stand silently beside the desks.

Even within myself, there’s something of a contradiction. But I’ve concluded it’s a matter of establishing a midpoint between extremes. I don’t think you need to have performative displays of respect. You don’t have to force kids to stand at attention beside their desks, but they should at least be discouraged from sprinting through the classroom and crashing into other students.

Even among affluent students, there’s always a hierarchy. It was pretty clear which ones considered themselves above any kind of rules. The students themselves had learned to show extra respect to certain classmates. You had students essentially demanding of other students that they must stand at attention and show deference.

So it begins.

I’ve been reading a book about a thief in an oppressive society. This is a theme that is common in literature. It’s a model for how human beings have historically confronted oppression. The thieves learn to take on the entitled attitude of the ruling class, and what you find is if you bluster about with an attitude of entitlement, people will assume you come from power because they’ve been so conditioned by fear. Pretending you belong to a privileged class is an example of resistance through audacity.

In our society, acting respectful is something that’s only expected of the poor and the powerless. Demanding respect is something that’s reserved only for the rich and powerful. We need to work towards a society where no matter who you are, what you look like, and what language you speak you’re entitled to the same level of respect as anyone else.

That’s how I’ve tried to live my life, but I had to teach myself. When I was younger I was conditioned to this idea that some people were better than others. We get that in the United States of America. It’s part of American teachings. American exceptionalism is the teaching that Americans deserve more respect than people of other parts of the world.

It’s flawed teaching.

It’s immoral.

But it’s commonplace in our schools and in our culture. It’s commonplace in our communities. It’s what Americans are told to think.

It’s wrong.

American exceptionalism is something we have to expel from our cultural identity. We shouldn’t teach that attitude of entitlement to our kids. The current movement against concepts like diversity and equality and inclusion demonstrate the danger of the entitlement ideology.

There’s a significant portion of our population that feels they don’t have to treat their fellow human beings with respect. In fact, they ferociously stand up and fight for their right to be disrespectful. It frustrates me that few people ever call them out on this.

I’m intensely frustrated right now, particularly with our religious community. The ideas that are being floated about as national policy, ideas such as mass deportations, are disgusting things to suggest. Having that concept out in the atmosphere is disrespectful.

I know that apologists say people sometimes say terrible things that aren’t meant to be taken seriously. They claim these awful comments are jokes. I’ve seen that behavior play out before too. I’ve seen entitled people, bullies, who delight in flexing their muscles. I’ve seen members of a privileged class who loudly boast about all the individuals they have the power to hurt. They run down anybody who doesn’t look like them, or who doesn’t speak the same language, or who has darker skin.

These bullies make it clear that they want to deport innocent, hardworking people. The trauma this will cause, is a source of humor for them. I guess they think it’s funny to see innocent people humbled by terror. I guess they find humor in the tears of traumatized children.

Consider the proposal of declaring a national emergency, and going from house to house, and using the military to kick down doors. Consider the horrors of taking sleeping children from their beds before tossing them into the sand across the border, and forcing them to fend for themselves.

Consider that.

This idea is an act of appalling cruelty and hatred. It makes me physically sick to think about it. It’s such an awful and hateful idea that I think it is incumbent upon our spiritual community to denounce it. They should be at the front lines. They should be the loudest who are out calling for love and inclusion and acceptance.

Multiple times I’ve tried to talk to religious leaders and ask them to speak up and work to end the hatred that’s directed against immigrants. They won’t do it. But when I say this, other people come out of the woodwork and berate me and insist, “Oh, it’s happening. They’re out there. There’s some that are speaking out. The media just doesn’t cover it.”

But even that comment is more interested in giving credit where credit is not due than it is in speaking out against the hate campaigns that plague our nation. Insisting, “Some churches are doing it,” only diverts from the issue of stopping hatred. Everybody knows that the prevailing mindset in the modern USA is to unfairly attack immigrants.

We shouldn’t hand out credit for speaking out against hatred until the hatred has been defeated. What I see looking around is the incessant promotion of violence, anger, and grievance.

We need peace, tolerance and acceptance.

I often encounter skepticism from other white men. I’m a white man, but I have the privilege of being married to an immigrant. So I have a front row seat to the harassment that my wife and my kids endure. I don’t get to see all of it, because I’m not with them for every second of the day. But I know it happens.

As much as I try, my wife has to remind me sometimes. She says, “Your experience isn’t the same as mine because you’re a white man and I’m Latina.” This is something that I, even having examples of anti-immigrant harassment in my life daily, I still don’t fully comprehend. It’s because it’s not happening to me. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

When I have people confront me and say, “Well, I’m not seeing that.” I instantly look to their profile. If the profile shows a white man, I say, “Well, there’s your answer.” Just because these things aren’t befalling you doesn’t mean they don’t exist. This is the problem. We have white churches led by white men that are failing to effectively oppose the hatred in our society.

We have churches that prohibit women from preaching. This means that crimes that are committed against women are underrepresented within our moral community. The people who attend these churches just don’t see it. All they see are white man problems.

They’re like the entitled rich kids who are angry because the poor kids aren’t standing by their desks to show them the absurd display of deference they feel they are entitled to. Our whole society is being instructed to accept this viewpoint

Too many rich white men feel entitled to live in their little bubbles and allow hatred to proliferate in our communities.

Sit back and allow me to paint a picture of what the mass deportations so many people are clamoring for are going to look like. Consider the military breaking into a house of an immigrant. Consider crying babies, terrified, inflicted with lifelong trauma. Consider kids separated from their parents.

On social media there are pages that still celebrate the confederacy. There are people in our society who spend all day in their echo chambers convincing themselves that other people are less than human. They want to use the military to break into houses and send people away.

Our voting public goes along with it. Many people like this idea of saber-rattling. They celebrate the thought of threatening people. They like to keep people in their place.

“Stand at attention when I enter the room!”

They maintain fear by keeping threat and anxiety constantly in the atmosphere. At some point you have to sit down and acknowledge that this is an oppressive society. If you say that “your church is doing good works but the media doesn’t cover it” then you’ve just acknowledged the existence of a propaganda mechanism that doesn’t provide accurate information.

These are the pillars of oppression that rise up within any authoritarian society. One red flag is when the general population begins to celebrate the thought of using the military to deport human beings.

If you think of yourself as a good person, you can’t stand quiet when people talk about these ideas. You can’t stand quiet when efforts are made to normalize the concept of mass deportations.

You can’t stand quiet.

You can’t laugh along with the horrible people who say things like this and pretend it’s a joke, when you know they fully intend to do it. Think of the anxiety that’s felt in households. We’re a few days away from Christmas, and our news doesn’t push back against these hateful ideas that are said with a laugh.

They’re laughing about how much people are going to be hurt, they’re laughing about the pain of children, which they are going to pluck from their beds and toss into the dirt at night on the other side of their loathsome border wall.

Consider that.

We sit and think to ourselves it’s not our problem, but it is our problem.

We are citizens of this era. We are complicit in whatever crimes are committed by our society. You have to speak out. We can’t allow people to normalize horrible crimes against humanity. That’s what mass deportation is. Using the military against regular people can’t become the policy of our country.

Don’t try and muddy the waters with the statistics about how members of the Latin community voted. That is nothing more than a proof of how many people were effectively lied to. Where did they get their information? Do they go to a white church with a white preacher who is only concerned about his white, male problems?

Even people who disagree with me acknowledge that the media doesn’t cover the stories they think are important. There’s your proof.

Those of us who have access to accurate sources of information have to recognize it’s up to us to share our privilege. We have to help other people make their decisions based on facts rather than manipulation, half-truths, and outright lies. Don’t sit quietly when people around you mention the idea of mass deportations. If it’s mentioned on the news, speak out and declare that the proposal violates the right to human dignity. Denounce it as an attack on human beings.

People have to know what is going to happen. You know the media won’t cover it. We have to see the consequences of the authoritarian proposals the bullies are laughing about. They know full well how to control the narrative the same way they push unpopular votes through at legislative sessions held at midnight. The result is that otherwise good people don’t recognize the true horror of what’s approaching until it’s too late.

Our so-called moral community is complicit in these crimes against humanity, not just in their failure to speak out but in the fact that they sometimes promote them. We must recognize how the moral community has helped clear the path to enable abuses of human rights. We have to speak out.

The pain we put into the world comes back to us tenfold. It’s important that everyone knows how much pain these policies are going to inflict on innocent children in the immediate future. There’s still time to stop it, if enough of us speak out, if enough of us do the right thing.

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