Mourning the U.S. I Knew

Watching its descent from 3,600 miles away.

Licensed via bartsadowski

It’s a strange thing to watch your country tear itself apart from 3,600 miles away. I run out of places to put my feelings. Guilt. Helplessness. Fear. Sadness. Feeling gaslit. And anger—a cold, coiled anger.

What I face is fractional compared to those who fled their countries out of fear or necessity. My wife and I weren’t in danger when we left. We weren’t in need. We didn’t flee. There’s a great privilege in that, I know. Still, observing the U.S.’s continuing doom-spiral from abroad has been hard, but it has also granted me a fresh perspective. The seed of the following realization has been germinating for a while, and here it’s blossomed:

The U.S. I knew is gone.

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To be clear, I’m not saying the U.S. was all peaches and cream before this. The country didn’t suddenly break bad.

Yes, black people have suffered this and worse for hundreds of years.

Yes, the abuse and persecution of immigrants and migrants, especially at the border, is nothing new.

Yes, migrants have died in detention for years and years.

Yes, the Border Patrol has employed racist, draconian tactics for decades before ICE even formed.

Yes, the U.S. was built by captive black bodies on land stolen violently from the people who already lived here.

Yes, billionaires have been arranging the chess pieces for decades.

Yes, this regime is not the sickness but rather a symptom of a sickness long ignored.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

But.

There is a new species of danger this country faces. The tactic itself—disinformation, misinformation and propaganda—is as old as society itself, and likely older, but its application is unprecedented, weaponized at cosmic scale and speed. And scale matters. It’s the difference between a pocketknife and a nuclear bomb.

Our tech overlords mined our thoughts and commoditized an old, base instinct: fear of the other, which sprouted in humankind’s infancy from a need to survive. It is the indivisible atom of our ugliest proclivities. Worst of all, it can be repurposed infinitely, directed variously at black people, immigrants, Muslims, atheists, gay people, women, liberals—anyone, in other words, who may be different.

Fear of the other is a design flaw in human beings, exploited mercilessly by a Machiavellian cohort of politicians, plutocrats and technocrats. This fear supplies the powers that be with an endlessly renewable resource: Difference. There will always be different people, because difference, like accents, depends on point of view.

I watch with horror as people I knew—or thought I knew—contort themselves into unnatural shapes to justify the state-sanctioned murder, kidnapping, violence and rape of the nation’s people. Friends and former colleagues, who I thought were good people, are suddenly bereft of empathy and riddled with a meme-happy, bloodthirsty schadenfreude masquerading as a sense of justice.

A U.S. citizen is murdered in broad daylight? “Fuck around and fight out.”

An ICE agent rapes a migrant in detention for months? “She probably gave it up for special treatment.”

Dozens of ICE detainees die in custody? “They wouldn’t have been in that situation if they followed our laws.”

I point out that the growth of ICE detainees is driven largely by migrants with no criminal convictions, that the U.S.-born are more likely to commit crimes than immigrants, that U.S. citizens are more likely to commit crimes than undocumented immigrants, and that ICE has no jurisdiction over U.S. citizens and shouldn’t be conducting traffic stops or showing up to people’s houses without judicial warrants.

It doesn’t matter what I say. The facts and figures I cite have no impact. They have their own set, provided by the lever-pullers who would keep us at each other’s throats forever. Nothing sways them. I’m stumped by their mulishness. I have no choice but to marvel at this feat of social engineering.

So, I mourn. I mourn the country I knew, or rather the country I thought I knew. I mourn the people I knew, or rather the people I thought I knew. I suppose, really, I mourn the old version of me who believed those things. Or maybe it isn’t mourning at all. Maybe this is what an awakening feels like. It shouldn’t surprise me that it would be uncomfortable. No one likes waking up, after all. That’s why we’re in this mess to begin with.

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