It’s Time to Start Breaking Things

That is, if we want to be able to live with ourselves one day.

Photo by Jerry Lara, Houston Chronicle.

Last Sunday, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley was denied entrance to a detention center in Texas where children seeking asylum are held. Merkley had hoped to tour the DHHS facility, located in an old Walmart building, but instead a supervisor called the local police on him.

Merkley was able to tour two other DHHS detention facilities, during which he reported seeing, “a series of cages that look like large dog kennels, with people jammed into them, with space blankets.”

The Senator also saw, “very large cages which [hold] the children who have been separated from the parents.” Merkley estimated that one of the cages held around 50 children, ranging in age from around 4–5 years old to 16–17 years old.

These children are not being detained alone because they arrived unaccompanied, as some have in the past. These children are detained alone as the result of a Trump Administration policy to separate families seeking asylum in the US. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly described this practice as, “a tough deterrent.”

In addition to separating families seeking asylum, the Trump Administration has also implemented new policies expanding the use of private, for-profit prisons to detain immigrants. In these prisons, immigrants who fled poverty and violence most people born in the US could never comprehend for the chance at a better life are forced to work for as little as a dollar a day.

Yet, these crimes against humanity are hardly surprising when you consider they’re being ordered and overseen by a President who last year pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who once called the detention center where he held individuals who were racially profiled and detained with no due process a “concentration camp.”

The undercurrent driving these inhumane policies is, of course, a deep-seated desire by the President to dehumanize those he sees as sub-human, enabled by his ability to keep the American public in a state of political and moral hypnosis.

Every day, our tax dollars fund Trump’s detention centers where families who fled violent, authoritarian regimes are forcibly separated by another and then forced to work with no real compensation. Every day, our tax dollars fund the salaries of Border Patrol agents who spend their time sealing the fate of dying immigrants by dumping out jugs of water left by humanitarian groups.

Whether we like it or not, we are complicit in these crimes against humanity. Every day that we wake up and are content to continue living our lives as they have been defined for us, we are implicitly subscribing to a social contract in which our comfort is inextricably linked to the suffering of others.

Whether you like it or not, if you have the luxury of skimming this article as one of many actions in a sequence of complacency that constitutes your day, you are morally complicit in every inhumane act your government carries out on your behalf in the meantime.

Whether I like it or not, every morning that I sleep in late and watch an entire episode of West Wing before rolling out of bed instead of driving to the nearest DHHS or ICE detention center and demanding answers until I’m dragged away in handcuffs, I am allowing this system of injustice to perpetuate itself.

The inevitable result of any sort of moral calculus involving the Trump administration is that every time we wonder whether he really did sleep with Stormy Daniels or not, every time we wonder why it’s been so long since we’ve seen Melania, and every time we read his latest absurd Tweet, he wins.

Every time we attempt to participate in the reality-T.V. show that Trump has turned our national political dialogue into instead of facing the facts as they are and working to change them, he wins.

If it seems like progressives today have become moralistic, understand that it’s because cold-hearted neo-conservatives and neo-liberals have made it clear they’re content to continue putting politics over people when human rights and democratic institutions are under unprecedented threat in the most powerful nation in the world.