It’s a complicated issue.
Maybe it doesn’t affect you directly.
Maybe you’ve got a lot going on in your own life or your own community.
Maybe you’d rather not think about it.
Maybe you’d rather not hear from me about it.
I get it.
These are difficult, divisive times.
There are plenty of reasons to turn off your brain or your heart.
About six years ago, I wrote a piece about our obligation to care about what happens to other people. I wrote it in part because I was frustrated by the news that the sheriff in the rural county I live in was engaging in targeted traffic stops at night so they could detain and deport Latino immigrants (I was myself pulled over driving back from the airport one night but of course immediately let go as soon as the officer approached my car). I wrote it in part because of the videos I’d seen of the killings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.
I thought about it again the last few weeks as I watched the same horrifying videos that you may have watched.
One of the things I said in that piece was that I didn’t like the idea of “privilege” being the focus of the conversation in the discussions about the police or race. The fact that my publisher sends me early copies of books before they are released, I said, that’s a privilege. Something I didn’t earn, something that can disappear, something that I enjoy but am not entitled to.
But not being harassed on the street by the police or by vigilantes? Not being strangled to death on suspicion of some minor crime? Not being tear gassed or thrown to the ground for protesting government policies?
That’s not a privilege.
That’s a constitutional right. Actually, it’s more than a constitutional right. According to the Founding Fathers and many philosophers before and since, the rights to life and liberty and property are beyond constitutional: They are inalienable.
The right to not be murdered, to not be harassed by people with guns, to not be targeted, exploited or incarcerated unfairly, to speak your mind, to pursue your religion, for your home to be a safe haven, these are not things that governments give to their people. These are things that God—or generations of evolution and progress—endowed us with at birth, and that we in turn give governments the power to protect.
All of us.
Black. White. Rich. Poor. Young. Old. Republican. Democrat. Socialist. Even annoying, obnoxious idiots. If these basic rights are threatened for one person, for one community, it’s threatened for all people.
Oh but these people came here illegally… But previous administrations deported a lot of people. But some of these people are criminals…Due process. Due process. Due process. That’s the answer to every one of those objections. It doesn’t matter if you’re a serial killer, everyone is entitled to their day in court.
Look, the punishment for filming I.C.E is not summary execution. The punishment for fleeing in your vehicle is not extrajudicial murder, even if a federal agent thinks you’re “a fucking bitch.” (Being shot in the face three times is not the punishment for hitting a federal officer with your car either, it’s worth saying!) The punishment for coming to the United States illegally—the punishment for overstaying your visa or indeed any kind of violation of immigration laws—is and never will be a trip to an El Salvadorian torture prison.
Immigration is a complicated issue. Crime is complicated. My dad was a cop for twenty years, I understand it’s a hard job. But this is not complicated.
Heavily armed masked agents should not be storming American streets demanding to see people’s papers. They should not be harassing citizens, making arrests and sorting things out later. They should not be harassing people because they don’t look or sound like citizens. They should not be entering schools or hospitals or courthouses or churches to try to take people away.
OK?
It should not be controversial to say that.
In fact, it is our job as human beings (and Stoics) to say it.
Callous indifference to suffering by the authorities towards minorities or the poor or the voiceless is not just a lamentable fact of modern life, it’s an active crime. One we are complicit in, if we ignore it or rationalize it or tolerate it.
Marcus Aurelius wrote two thousand years ago that “you can also commit an injustice by doing nothing.” The Stoics believed that harm to one was to harm all. Martin Luther King explained this idea of sympatheia beautifully. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he said. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
I understand that this might not be what you want to hear from me. I write about self-improvement. I write about philosophy. I write about history. That’s true.
But what do you think the point of the study of those three things is? It’s not so you can make a little more money. It’s not so you can live in your own bubble or have interesting dinner conversations. It’s so you can be better. So you can do the right thing when it counts.
You have to realize that if the state can find ways to deprive someone of their rights, then they can find ways to deprive you of yours. If they can get away with brutalizing one group, eventually they’ll brutalize you. In fact, this is an inexorable law of power, whether it’s held by segregationists or Stalin, bureaucrats following orders or malevolent dictators. When you give power an inch, it takes another. When you allow evil to happen because you are not its victim, it will inevitably find its way to you—or if not you, to someone you love, or to your great-great-grandchildren.
That’s what Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First they came…” is about. You know it:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Niemöller’s words were not theoretical. He tolerated, even complied with, policies he didn’t agree with. He rationalized them, assuming his Christian church would be protected. For a while, it was. But in the end, Niemöller found himself in Dachau, where he nearly died. Someone later asked how he could have been so self-absorbed, so silent when it mattered. “I am paying for that mistake now,” he said, “and not me alone, but thousands of other persons like me.”
It is essential that you see it this way. Because when you do, you realize that this affects you, it affects everyone.
Directly.
Urgently.
There is no such thing as an issue that doesn’t affect you. We are all bees of the same hive, Marcus writes in Meditations. There is no injustice far enough away, no victim different enough, no rationalization clever enough to make you exempt from the single hive we all share.
It may be complicated.
But your obligation isn’t.
You have to care.
