8/3/21

By Josh Rubin

Practices like the rejection of people at our southern border, and the now resumed practice of loading families on planes to send them back to places from which they fled in fear or in desperation—practices like these rely on psychological and physical distance. Humans, in order to avoid empathy, rely on the avoidance of engagement, perhaps by never venturing near, or by taking care not to lock eyes with those whose eyes can disarm us with their terrifying hope and need.

And it takes an effort to look the other way. As we have learned, burying pain, repressing it within ourselves will cost us sooner or later with the force of a dam bursting, with tragic consequences. So, since we are social animals with a capacity and inclination towards empathy, as costly to our hearts is that practice with a different target and prefix, oppression. Think of the danger as the return of the oppressed.

In an historic frame, there will be hell to pay, but the day of comeuppance may not face every generation. Still, each of us can have our lives poisoned by the self-willed blindness that lets us ignore the pain we are unwilling to look at. All during our own lifetimes.

And as we who do look see now, in the last weeks as much as in the centuries we lament, the infliction of particularly callous hardship, the inclination for those in power and those themselves overwhelmed to avert their eyes, I remind myself of this theme: witness.

Look at them. Gaze into the humanity of their eyes, and find your own. The rest will follow.