2/23/22

By Josh Rubin

We live in a time when the amount of information that reaches us is enough to swamp us, overwhelm us, and, frankly, discourage us. With the pandemic, the climate, the specter of war, some issues, I should say some people, find themselves overshadowed. Forgotten.

You know who I mean. If we were looking, we would see them being loaded onto planes and flown back to the places they fled. We would see them being herded across the bridges at our southern border, many camping in makeshift shelters or scraping for shelter, there to wait for another chance at crossing to safety.

And we would see, if we were looking, that the current administration in the US is hanging onto a policy of extralegal deportation known as Title 42, which it claims gives them the right to ignore laws that protect asylum seekers and simply brush off desperate people who come to our borders for help. Sorry. Too busy right now to deal with you.

Some say that migrants are being treated so harshly because a terrible political toll would be paid for behaving as humanitarians. That they would, if they could, behave decently, but that the opposition would use signs of sympathy toward migrants as a potent issue to appeal to those whose hearts are full of hatred for foreigners, for black and brown people. They argue that the current policies are a political calculation.

Missing from the calculus, from the equation, is the equality of humanity. To me, at least, it seems clear that hidden in the political calculus that is being used is the famous fraction from the days of American slavery: three-fifths. What I mean is that without a discounting of the value of certain lives, certain bodies, the calculus wouldn’t add up to a policy which this cruel, brutally so. What I mean is that racism, the devaluation of the other, distorts the formula.

We will need a world that embraces the full measure of all humanity. When we recalculate with that adjustment upward of the worth of now-devalued human lives, decency and justice will wipe away the brutality and “realpolitik” that occupy the space to the right of the equal sign.