Is America becoming a crueler place? In the last two days, I’ve seen three disturbing news stories. First, Boston police “cleaned up” part of the city’s South End by hassling homeless people and destroying their possessions. This is not atypical police behavior, but the Boston PD achieved newsworthy levels of callousness after they apparently literally threw disabled people’s wheelchairs into a trash compactor. Here, read Boston magazine’s report:
“You could hear the metal crushing noise. It was really loud. They just tossed it in and crushed it,” says Cassie Hurd, a Boston homeless advocate who at the time had been observing the area. Hurd says about 15 BPD and state police cruisers, along with a DPW trash truck, rolled up to Mass. Ave. after dark and began telling the people congregating there to leave. Any unattended items were confiscated, she says, including at least three wheelchairs. “We spent a significant amount of time with someone who lost his wheelchair. He is not able to be mobile without it, and not having a home, nowhere to sit, nowhere to go, and was having pain. He couldn’t really balance or walk,” Hurd says. “He had left his wheelchair for a minute and his partner tried everything to keep the wheelchair. She pleaded with police and was sobbing and crying. They took it and threw it in the back of the truck and it was devastating to watch. There was nothing anyone could do to prevent them from throwing it out.” The man, who she identified as Jarrod, told her he had been injured in a hit-and-run car crash about a week earlier and had been prescribed the wheelchair by a doctor. His backpack had also been taken and trashed in the sweep, she says he told her.
Being a cop can turn you callous, we know that. But really, if you destroy a homeless person’s wheelchair as they beg you to stop, you’ve lost the very last shred of your humanity. There’s nothing left.
Next story: The government deported a schizophrenic man from Detroit, sending him to live on the streets of Baghdad. Jimmy Aldaoud had never lived in Iraq, and didn’t speak Arabic. In a desperate video he posted online from Iraq, Jimmy said:
“They wouldn’t listen to me… They wouldn’t let me call my family. Nothing. They just said: You’re going to Iraq and your best bet is to cooperate with us. That way we’re not going to chain you up; we’ll put you on a commercial flight. I begged them. I said, ‘Please, I’ve never seen that country. I’ve never been there.’ However, they forced me. I’m here now… I don’t understand the language. I’ve been sleeping in the street… I’m diabetic. I can’t get insulin shots. I’ve been throwing up, sleeping in the streets, trying to find something to eat. I’ve got nothing over here.”
Aldaoud died in Baghdad, alone and miserable, apparently from lack of access to insulin. “He was literally crying every day,” said his sister.
Third and finally, ICE conducted a series of immigration raids at Mississippi food-processing plants and arrested about 680 people, the largest single-state immigration raid in U.S. history. Children came home from school to find their parents gone. An ICE official replied to criticism of this: “We are a law enforcement agency, not a social services agency.” Here is 11-year-old Magdalena Gomez Gregorio tearfully begging for her father’s release:
“Government please show some heart, let my parent be free with everybody else please… My dad didn’t do nothing. He’s not a criminal.”
I don’t know how anyone can do these things and live with themselves. But “rules are rules” arguments are very powerful. “I don’t make the law, I just enforce it.” Of course, everyone has a duty not to participate in the enforcement of certain laws. If they didn’t, then the “just following orders” defense to genocide would be valid, and there would be nothing wrong with participating in the building of a totalitarian nightmare-state. I think one big problem with cops and soldiers is that they launder their morality and fail to exercise the basic responsibility of asking whether what they are doing is humane.
But even that lets them off the hook too much. Take the wheelchairs. There is no law saying that cops have to destroy a homeless person’s wheelchair. That’s a matter of pure discretion. Even if you’re told to conduct “Operation Clean Sweep,” nobody is going to object to you allowing the disabled to roll away rather than, as depicted in a tragic photo from the scene, stagger away painfully. What could possibly cause police to act this way?
I don’t know, there’s just a kind of “authoritarian mentality” that many of them seem to develop, where they think “the law” means “barking orders at people and then punishing them mercilessly if they don’t comply to the letter.” Look at that poor guy who got murdered at the La Quinta in Arizona. The officer kept shouting instructions at him and confusing him, and then when he made an unexpected movement the officer filled him with bullets. The cop was acquitted at court, then given early retirement and a pension.
Is it accurate to say America is becoming crueler? Most of American history has been pretty cruel. Immigrants, people of color, the disabled, the homeless—they have never been well-treated here. I can’t tell whether the place is getting worse, or I’m just noticing things that have been happening continuously from the beginning. There aredifferences—as I say, the immigration raid is bigger than any we’ve seen. Certainly, Donald Trump has a gratuitously cruel personality, from encouraging rally attendees to beat up protesters to telling cops they should stop protecting suspects’ heads from whacking into the doorframe as they are shoved into the back of police cars. If the president, to any degree, sets the “moral tone” for the country, and changes the bounds of what is socially permissible, then I wouldn’t be surprised if America was getting nastier on average.
I hesitate to say that “we” are becoming crueler, though. Despite scenes of wheelchairs being smashed by garbage trucks and little girls crying about their dads being taken away, there is tremendous resistance and resilience. In some quarters I feel a kind of warmth and solidarity I’ve never seen before in my life. Public opinion has actually turned more pro-immigrant over time, not less, and Donald Trump does not represent the conscience of the country.
Still, it doesn’t take a majority to create a nightmare. I worry that this is just the beginning. Already around me I see some supposed “leftists” defending strict immigration enforcement, which means rounding up families in the night and tearing parents away from kids. Setting aside the encouraging compassion and outrage I feel at DSA events, it’s still true that the vast majority of people look upon their government doing horrific things, shrug, and go about their day. It honestly makes me think: What would happen if they started exterminating people? If nobody had to see it, if people just disappeared in the night, and the ones taken were homeless or “illegal,” what would happen to stop it? Jimmy Aldaoud was exterminated. He’s dead now, because the government deliberately sent a diabetic schizophrenic to one of the world’s most dangerous cities. I’m not seeing people marching for Jimmy. I’m in a coffee shop right now, and people are drinking macchiatos and talking about their lives.
“You could hear the metal crushing noise. It was really loud. They just tossed it in and crushed it,” says Cassie Hurd, a Boston homeless advocate who at the time had been observing the area. Hurd says about 15 BPD and state police cruisers, along with a DPW trash truck, rolled up to Mass. Ave. after dark and began telling the people congregating there to leave. Any unattended items were confiscated, she says, including at least three wheelchairs. “We spent a significant amount of time with someone who lost his wheelchair. He is not able to be mobile without it, and not having a home, nowhere to sit, nowhere to go, and was having pain. He couldn’t really balance or walk,” Hurd says. “He had left his wheelchair for a minute and his partner tried everything to keep the wheelchair. She pleaded with police and was sobbing and crying. They took it and threw it in the back of the truck and it was devastating to watch. There was nothing anyone could do to prevent them from throwing it out.” The man, who she identified as Jarrod, told her he had been injured in a hit-and-run car crash about a week earlier and had been prescribed the wheelchair by a doctor. His backpack had also been taken and trashed in the sweep, she says he told her.
Being a cop can turn you callous, we know that. But really, if you destroy a homeless person’s wheelchair as they beg you to stop, you’ve lost the very last shred of your humanity. There’s nothing left.Next story: The government deported a schizophrenic man from Detroit, sending him to live on the streets of Baghdad. Jimmy Aldaoud had never lived in Iraq, and didn’t speak Arabic. In a desperate video he posted online from Iraq, Jimmy said:
“They wouldn’t listen to me… They wouldn’t let me call my family. Nothing. They just said: You’re going to Iraq and your best bet is to cooperate with us. That way we’re not going to chain you up; we’ll put you on a commercial flight. I begged them. I said, ‘Please, I’ve never seen that country. I’ve never been there.’ However, they forced me. I’m here now… I don’t understand the language. I’ve been sleeping in the street… I’m diabetic. I can’t get insulin shots. I’ve been throwing up, sleeping in the streets, trying to find something to eat. I’ve got nothing over here.”
Aldaoud died in Baghdad, alone and miserable, apparently from lack of access to insulin. “He was literally crying every day,” said his sister.
Third and finally, ICE conducted a series of immigration raids at Mississippi food-processing plants and arrested about 680 people, the largest single-state immigration raid in U.S. history. Children came home from school to find their parents gone. An ICE official replied to criticism of this: “We are a law enforcement agency, not a social services agency.” Here is 11-year-old Magdalena Gomez Gregorio tearfully begging for her father’s release:
“Government please show some heart, let my parent be free with everybody else please… My dad didn’t do nothing. He’s not a criminal.”
I don’t know how anyone can do these things and live with themselves. But “rules are rules” arguments are very powerful. “I don’t make the law, I just enforce it.” Of course, everyone has a duty not to participate in the enforcement of certain laws. If they didn’t, then the “just following orders” defense to genocide would be valid, and there would be nothing wrong with participating in the building of a totalitarian nightmare-state. I think one big problem with cops and soldiers is that they launder their morality and fail to exercise the basic responsibility of asking whether what they are doing is humane.
But even that lets them off the hook too much. Take the wheelchairs. There is no law saying that cops have to destroy a homeless person’s wheelchair. That’s a matter of pure discretion. Even if you’re told to conduct “Operation Clean Sweep,” nobody is going to object to you allowing the disabled to roll away rather than, as depicted in a tragic photo from the scene, stagger away painfully. What could possibly cause police to act this way?
I don’t know, there’s just a kind of “authoritarian mentality” that many of them seem to develop, where they think “the law” means “barking orders at people and then punishing them mercilessly if they don’t comply to the letter.” Look at that poor guy who got murdered at the La Quinta in Arizona. The officer kept shouting instructions at him and confusing him, and then when he made an unexpected movement the officer filled him with bullets. The cop was acquitted at court, then given early retirement and a pension.
Is it accurate to say America is becoming crueler? Most of American history has been pretty cruel. Immigrants, people of color, the disabled, the homeless—they have never been well-treated here. I can’t tell whether the place is getting worse, or I’m just noticing things that have been happening continuously from the beginning. There aredifferences—as I say, the immigration raid is bigger than any we’ve seen. Certainly, Donald Trump has a gratuitously cruel personality, from encouraging rally attendees to beat up protesters to telling cops they should stop protecting suspects’ heads from whacking into the doorframe as they are shoved into the back of police cars. If the president, to any degree, sets the “moral tone” for the country, and changes the bounds of what is socially permissible, then I wouldn’t be surprised if America was getting nastier on average.
I hesitate to say that “we” are becoming crueler, though. Despite scenes of wheelchairs being smashed by garbage trucks and little girls crying about their dads being taken away, there is tremendous resistance and resilience. In some quarters I feel a kind of warmth and solidarity I’ve never seen before in my life. Public opinion has actually turned more pro-immigrant over time, not less, and Donald Trump does not represent the conscience of the country.
Still, it doesn’t take a majority to create a nightmare. I worry that this is just the beginning. Already around me I see some supposed “leftists” defending strict immigration enforcement, which means rounding up families in the night and tearing parents away from kids. Setting aside the encouraging compassion and outrage I feel at DSA events, it’s still true that the vast majority of people look upon their government doing horrific things, shrug, and go about their day. It honestly makes me think: What would happen if they started exterminating people? If nobody had to see it, if people just disappeared in the night, and the ones taken were homeless or “illegal,” what would happen to stop it? Jimmy Aldaoud was exterminated. He’s dead now, because the government deliberately sent a diabetic schizophrenic to one of the world’s most dangerous cities. I’m not seeing people marching for Jimmy. I’m in a coffee shop right now, and people are drinking macchiatos and talking about their lives.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. I feel some pity (not much) for anyone who still supports Trump, and the whole un-American apparatus that surrounds and encourages him (Republican Senate included). For the rest of their lives they'll have to live with the knowledge that they're the ones who would Go Nazi (Dorothy Thompson, Harper's). Not a nice thing to live with. See also: New Trump rule targets poor and could cut legal immigration in half (Reuters).]
