11/5/21

By Josh Rubin

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the implications of members of the Border Patrol who on social media made a practice of speaking contemptuously of migrants, not to mention profanely about political figures, particularly women, who speak up for migrants. And I suggested a psychological explanation for such ugliness: that the cruelty of our policies is so odious that they have to pretend that the horror is bogus, and that the suffering they see and personally cause in the course of their jobs is not real, or that their victims in some way deserve what they get. To wit, that they are merely punishing criminals, horrible invaders come to take things from us by force, and, in an all-too-familiar trope, despoil our women.

I do not say this to make excuses for them; only to find some order in the universe by the exercise of trying to understand causes and effects. Along these same lines, I wanted to reflect on the way a ragged group of people in a state of desperation, and in an act of courage, are distorted to become a threat to our way of life. It is clear to many of us, I know, that this distortion is cynical. The burgeoning fascism in our country has shaken loose of any restraint, and no student of such movements can fail to recognize the despicable vilification of ethnic others that suggests the threat of filth and disease as its justification for its abominable acts of misdirection. (I am still mystified at how even many of those calling themselves moderate can be at peace with the libelous lie of Title 42!)

But there is a strange truth to the suggestion that the displaced people who are just now represented by a “caravan” of people walking vaguely in the direction of our southern border are somehow a threat to our way of life. Or at least to our way of seeing ourselves. If there were such a thing as karma, and if we were inclined to study history, the undistorted faces of the members of that bedraggled group might incline us toward recognizing the responsibility we as a country, and we as members of a materially privileged slice of humanity, bear for the violence of our exploitation in the region that can no longer hold them, and for the climate apocalypse that our national exhalations have wrought.

And, is it no wonder—without excusing this at all—that we might prefer to make the faces of this poor people’s march into faces of predatory evil, rather than see ourselves in the role of persecutors? And if we abandoned this defense, would it not threaten our way of life?

And would that be such a bad thing?