I’m not happy that I was right in my previous article, ‘Get to Picking or Get Gone’. I mean that as a country, Americans have become morally bankrupt enough to live without common decency, due process, and empathy. After two election cycles of playing to a nonexistent center, the Democratic Party is – say it with me now – at a historical low in popularity. One of the biggest flops was the handling of immigration as a policy issue because in accepting Trump’s framing the whole country was primed to think about immigration & immigrants as problematic and an impurity. Common decency holds that the average person on the street would be able to care for their neighbor as humans deserving of a chance to work hard and enjoy the fruits of their labour. However, just as it is less likely than ever to connect with your neighbour today, it seems less likely than ever for our society and culture to be capable of genuinely, and empathetically broadening the horizon of decency. In the past months we have needed to come together to protect friends, family, and fellow Americans from being disappeared. Masked and armed men are able to black bag anyone on what’s most likely an AI curated list of names. Agents of the state tasked with upending families are being paid more than the teachers of our children right now. What a free and fair country we live in! You can drive down your pothole-ridden streets and instead of assuming you just witnessed a kidnapping, it is actually reasonable to assume the government is using your tax money to send a Venezuelan to South Sudan. Getting a tattoo of Michael Jordan is grounds for being sent an ocean away without a trial in our wonderful country. The lack of due process concerning detention and deportation has already yielded horrific results with mistaken identities and nonexistent charges. Many of these people being deported don’t have the resources to protect or advocate for themselves, so being chained hand and foot and air lifted to second, third, and fourth locations is traumatising. As a baseline, being American constitutes a certain comfort in abusing the relationships we have with third world countries and their citizens. For nearly 100 years, Americans have played bully ball & ran roughshod over the lives of those we see no value in. Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia have long been enduring humiliating conditions at the hands of the US led world order. Children of those same countries dream of us in a twisted Stockholm Syndrome only to be reminded of where they stand. In the minds of many we aren’t even meant to wear shoes, forget standing as equals on American soil. I could wax poetic or plain about the way the future will remember what we do today, but is there a point? Yes. When the house you’re living in is burning, is it better to fight the fire, wait to burn, or douse yourself in gas? Millions of people’s lives & loves are forever shattered with little hope for repair, but that doesn’t mean that’s where this ends. Camps like Alligator Alcatraz may hold ‘illegals’ today, but how long until our culture of cruelty cannibalises itself? Immigrants today. Opponents tomorrow. Radicals next week. Moderates next month. Allies next year. Your children, siblings, and friends collateral for the administration in an attempt to get to you. Stakeouts outside your church & dragging you from your job. Working for impossible wages if ‘privileged’ enough to remain enslaved in the Land of the Free’s carceral system & doomed to shame and disorientation if sent abroad to places like CECOT. This is not the worst timeline, but we chose where we are. I beg you to organize. The Democrats won’t save us because we need to save ourselves.