Fear of the other
Using words to keep hate alive
Editor’s note – I spent the weekend in Mexico
and waited three hours to cross the border on Sunday evening. When I finally arrived at the border gate with two blonde girls, last names Phillips and Jones, I was thoroughly scrutinized before being permitted to re-enter the country of my birth by a federal agent from the Philippines with a thick Tagalog accent. I wouldn’t say I hated that man, not in the true sense of the word “hate,” but at that moment I was none too fond of him.
* * *
Hate is a thing for which we all have a capacity. Some of us will never hate but most of us will. A few of us will hate so thoroughly that hate will become our sustenance. The rest of us should never meet those who survive on hate. The majority of us who know our capacity to hate but don’t survive on it should look at it and see in its ugliness the very reason why we should avoid it at all costs. We should not indulge that capacity. We should starve it if possible.
Hate is so terrible a thing that we reserve it for targets who we perceive as different from us, inhuman, other. Hate is so dangerous a thing and so cruel we can’t bring ourselves to point it at anything that resembles us. We can’t hate things that are too much like ourselves. To do so would be suicidal. When we hate we must transform the object of our hatred into a monster – a repugnant thing devoid of humanity, something different, strange, menacing, unnatural and foreign – an alien.
What an ugly word that is. Alien. Look at it. It’s slithering and gruesome. It’s horrifying. It’s the kind of word we use for those things we hate. It even sounds hate-worthy. It isn’t the sort of word like “immigrant” or “foreign national” that connotes the humanity of the creature so labeled. It is a word that brands a thing as different, other-worldly and fearsome. It’s an ugly word for an ugly concept and the concept is hatred. Who is it that gets hated with such a word?
By far the majority, in fact nearly all illegal immigration into the United States comes
across our border with Mexico. Undocumented immigrants who cross the U.S./Mexico border include Guatemalans, Hondurans, Bolivians, Columbians, Salvadorans, and others, but they’re mostly Mexicans, probably half of them from the states of Oaxaca, Guerrero and Michoacán. More than 80 percent of all undocumented border crossers are men, the majority of them aged 30 years or younger. Most, but by no means all, are poorly educated, semi-skilled workers. Many come via the services of a “coyote” and owe a debt of servitude upon arrival, while many others cross on their own. Hundreds die every year in the deserts of California and Arizona.
Man, woman, or child, old or young, all of them are human beings and most of them are our close neighbors. They come a rather short distance by planetary standards and take a step in trepidation across an imaginary line into a land where they will be subjected to subhuman conditions and where all they once were will be swept away by the affixing of a new appellation – they cease being people and become aliens. And as if that ugly word needed a nefarious modifier, they become illegal aliens. With the appellation thus affixed the rest of us can bolster our hate with the force of law. Hate is easier to look at if it we believe it is justified.
Consider the following words written by CNN’s Lou Dobbs and printed in the pages of the New York Times on April 25th of this year:
NEW YORK (CNN) -- The Bush administration and the leadership of the Democratic Party are preparing to take another legislative leap at imposing a massive illegal alien amnesty on American citizens.
And the mainstream media are complicit in advancing this thinly veiled blanket amnesty. Instead of asking and answering important questions about why our immigration laws aren't being enforced and why we're permitting pervasive document fraud, the national media seem hell-bent on trying to obfuscate the issue, shamelessly playing with language, equating legal immigration with illegal immigration while obviously trying to preserve the illusion of objectivity.
Too often, the language of the national media describes illegal immigration as "migration" and illegal aliens as "undocumented immigrants," even though many of them have lots of documents, most of which are fraudulent or stolen. Some media outlets have taken to calling illegal aliens "entrants." Whether such language is meant to engender sympathy or to intentionally blur the distinction between legal and illegal, the mainstream media are taking sides in this debate.
Now are those the words of a man with a merely political point to make? Does one write, “imposing a massive illegal alien amnesty on American citizens,” to argue one side of a policy debate regarding the process of entry to the US or does one write such a line to demonize the object and sew fear among the readership? One thing is for certain, Lou Dobbs doesn’t want the media to “engender sympathy” for those thieving, fraudulent illegal aliens. Another thing is certain, it doesn’t get much more mainstream than the New York Times, the publication that ran Dobbs’ hateful rant about the mainstream press not using hateful words.
They’re people, Lou. They’re immigrants. They aren’t properly documented. T
hus they’re undocumented immigrants. They are not illegal aliens. To refer to them as aliens is to say they are “others.” To say they are illegal is to say something about their existence, not their status. What they are, Lou, are ten million or more people who work very hard, live very poorly, suffer exclusion from the mainstream resources we take for granted and do so having left behind everything familiar and comfortable to them, in most cases even their families, all in the desperate hope that their children might have an opportunity to live as they never could. I don’t think we need fewer such people; I think we need more of them. And whatever you wish to call them, the only things alien about them are their strange and foreign optimism, their unnatural hope, and their repugnant courage in the face of a recalcitrant dehumanization by fear mongers.
Why does a man hate? What really drives a man to make the object of his fiercest hate so ugly that he can hate that object without remorse? It should be obvious. Only one force is so compelling that a man can use it to engender something in himself as ugly as hatred – that force is fear. Only fear can motivate us to identify a thing as an alien. In the case of the undocumented immigrants at whom so much hatred in our time is evinced, our fear has to do with a perceived threat to a false identity. Some of us are afraid of the fact that one out of ten Americans – Americans – lacks a piece of paper. Those Americans do not look like “us,” speak like us or act like us. Their multitude might, therefore, threaten our “usness.”
To some of us that’s a fearsome threat and it gets met with a hatred that shows itself through excoriating rhetoric, jingoistic isolationism and self-proclaimed superiority, even entitlement. Perhaps we have always been thus and perhaps we had to be. After all, I am writing from a land taken by “us” from those “aliens’” forebears with the smoke of a barrel and the point of a saber. I wonder if my Cherokee ancestors saw my European ones as aliens. I suppose they must have.
But that sort of speculation has little to do with what we should do today, which is to chart a path to legitimizing humanity and diminishing the spread of fear and hate. That work begins with the recognition that there is nothing alien about hope. There is nothing alien about dreams. There is nothing alien about love of one’s children. Those things are alien to hatred, but they should not be alien to us. We are still imperfect. We are a people who include the monsters who drug a black man to death behind a pickup truck for the crime of being a different color. We are a people who include the beasts who flayed the skin from a young man’s back and left him to die strapped to a fence for the sin of having a different orientation. We are a people who have no compunction about fighting over human legitimacy in public, debating the worth of human beings who committed the grievous offense of being born on the wrong side of a line. We have work to do.
So why not let that work begin at home? Why not accept the truth – that some ten million of us are immigrants lacking proper documentation, but that those ten million are no more alien to us than that black man in Texas or that gay man in Wyoming. They are part of us. In a sense, they are us.
An little told tragedy of the current administration is that it not only wasted its power on profligacy and war, but by so doing it also threw away the political capital needed to accomplish the one admirable purpose it set out to achieve, which is to bring our hidden population out of the shadows and into the hopeful light through a legitimate process of inclusion and investment. Sadly, the sun has almost certainly set on comprehensive immigration reform and it will not rise again until there is a regime change in Washington, if then.
In the fullness of time history is a fair judge. It renders a verdict that stands as a testament to the ages and there is no fairer judge than that. A people are judged for what they did with their moment of opportunity. We have thus far squandered ours and now live in a world where hate sears our airwaves and pervades our public discourse. That must stop. I cannot accept that in my daughter’s golden years she will look at my time and ask herself why nobody halted the hatred before it could grow and consume us so that as the world heated up, so did human passions until they erupted from internal combustion. Hate is the ugliest thing, but it is not the most powerful thing. More powerful than hate by far is hope and I hope there is an end to hate. I hope.
Using words to keep hate alive
Editor’s note – I spent the weekend in Mexico
and waited three hours to cross the border on Sunday evening. When I finally arrived at the border gate with two blonde girls, last names Phillips and Jones, I was thoroughly scrutinized before being permitted to re-enter the country of my birth by a federal agent from the Philippines with a thick Tagalog accent. I wouldn’t say I hated that man, not in the true sense of the word “hate,” but at that moment I was none too fond of him.* * *
Hate is a thing for which we all have a capacity. Some of us will never hate but most of us will. A few of us will hate so thoroughly that hate will become our sustenance. The rest of us should never meet those who survive on hate. The majority of us who know our capacity to hate but don’t survive on it should look at it and see in its ugliness the very reason why we should avoid it at all costs. We should not indulge that capacity. We should starve it if possible.
Hate is so terrible a thing that we reserve it for targets who we perceive as different from us, inhuman, other. Hate is so dangerous a thing and so cruel we can’t bring ourselves to point it at anything that resembles us. We can’t hate things that are too much like ourselves. To do so would be suicidal. When we hate we must transform the object of our hatred into a monster – a repugnant thing devoid of humanity, something different, strange, menacing, unnatural and foreign – an alien.
What an ugly word that is. Alien. Look at it. It’s slithering and gruesome. It’s horrifying. It’s the kind of word we use for those things we hate. It even sounds hate-worthy. It isn’t the sort of word like “immigrant” or “foreign national” that connotes the humanity of the creature so labeled. It is a word that brands a thing as different, other-worldly and fearsome. It’s an ugly word for an ugly concept and the concept is hatred. Who is it that gets hated with such a word?
By far the majority, in fact nearly all illegal immigration into the United States comes
across our border with Mexico. Undocumented immigrants who cross the U.S./Mexico border include Guatemalans, Hondurans, Bolivians, Columbians, Salvadorans, and others, but they’re mostly Mexicans, probably half of them from the states of Oaxaca, Guerrero and Michoacán. More than 80 percent of all undocumented border crossers are men, the majority of them aged 30 years or younger. Most, but by no means all, are poorly educated, semi-skilled workers. Many come via the services of a “coyote” and owe a debt of servitude upon arrival, while many others cross on their own. Hundreds die every year in the deserts of California and Arizona.Man, woman, or child, old or young, all of them are human beings and most of them are our close neighbors. They come a rather short distance by planetary standards and take a step in trepidation across an imaginary line into a land where they will be subjected to subhuman conditions and where all they once were will be swept away by the affixing of a new appellation – they cease being people and become aliens. And as if that ugly word needed a nefarious modifier, they become illegal aliens. With the appellation thus affixed the rest of us can bolster our hate with the force of law. Hate is easier to look at if it we believe it is justified.
Consider the following words written by CNN’s Lou Dobbs and printed in the pages of the New York Times on April 25th of this year:
NEW YORK (CNN) -- The Bush administration and the leadership of the Democratic Party are preparing to take another legislative leap at imposing a massive illegal alien amnesty on American citizens.
And the mainstream media are complicit in advancing this thinly veiled blanket amnesty. Instead of asking and answering important questions about why our immigration laws aren't being enforced and why we're permitting pervasive document fraud, the national media seem hell-bent on trying to obfuscate the issue, shamelessly playing with language, equating legal immigration with illegal immigration while obviously trying to preserve the illusion of objectivity.
Too often, the language of the national media describes illegal immigration as "migration" and illegal aliens as "undocumented immigrants," even though many of them have lots of documents, most of which are fraudulent or stolen. Some media outlets have taken to calling illegal aliens "entrants." Whether such language is meant to engender sympathy or to intentionally blur the distinction between legal and illegal, the mainstream media are taking sides in this debate.
Now are those the words of a man with a merely political point to make? Does one write, “imposing a massive illegal alien amnesty on American citizens,” to argue one side of a policy debate regarding the process of entry to the US or does one write such a line to demonize the object and sew fear among the readership? One thing is for certain, Lou Dobbs doesn’t want the media to “engender sympathy” for those thieving, fraudulent illegal aliens. Another thing is certain, it doesn’t get much more mainstream than the New York Times, the publication that ran Dobbs’ hateful rant about the mainstream press not using hateful words.
They’re people, Lou. They’re immigrants. They aren’t properly documented. T
hus they’re undocumented immigrants. They are not illegal aliens. To refer to them as aliens is to say they are “others.” To say they are illegal is to say something about their existence, not their status. What they are, Lou, are ten million or more people who work very hard, live very poorly, suffer exclusion from the mainstream resources we take for granted and do so having left behind everything familiar and comfortable to them, in most cases even their families, all in the desperate hope that their children might have an opportunity to live as they never could. I don’t think we need fewer such people; I think we need more of them. And whatever you wish to call them, the only things alien about them are their strange and foreign optimism, their unnatural hope, and their repugnant courage in the face of a recalcitrant dehumanization by fear mongers.Why does a man hate? What really drives a man to make the object of his fiercest hate so ugly that he can hate that object without remorse? It should be obvious. Only one force is so compelling that a man can use it to engender something in himself as ugly as hatred – that force is fear. Only fear can motivate us to identify a thing as an alien. In the case of the undocumented immigrants at whom so much hatred in our time is evinced, our fear has to do with a perceived threat to a false identity. Some of us are afraid of the fact that one out of ten Americans – Americans – lacks a piece of paper. Those Americans do not look like “us,” speak like us or act like us. Their multitude might, therefore, threaten our “usness.”
To some of us that’s a fearsome threat and it gets met with a hatred that shows itself through excoriating rhetoric, jingoistic isolationism and self-proclaimed superiority, even entitlement. Perhaps we have always been thus and perhaps we had to be. After all, I am writing from a land taken by “us” from those “aliens’” forebears with the smoke of a barrel and the point of a saber. I wonder if my Cherokee ancestors saw my European ones as aliens. I suppose they must have.
But that sort of speculation has little to do with what we should do today, which is to chart a path to legitimizing humanity and diminishing the spread of fear and hate. That work begins with the recognition that there is nothing alien about hope. There is nothing alien about dreams. There is nothing alien about love of one’s children. Those things are alien to hatred, but they should not be alien to us. We are still imperfect. We are a people who include the monsters who drug a black man to death behind a pickup truck for the crime of being a different color. We are a people who include the beasts who flayed the skin from a young man’s back and left him to die strapped to a fence for the sin of having a different orientation. We are a people who have no compunction about fighting over human legitimacy in public, debating the worth of human beings who committed the grievous offense of being born on the wrong side of a line. We have work to do.
So why not let that work begin at home? Why not accept the truth – that some ten million of us are immigrants lacking proper documentation, but that those ten million are no more alien to us than that black man in Texas or that gay man in Wyoming. They are part of us. In a sense, they are us.
An little told tragedy of the current administration is that it not only wasted its power on profligacy and war, but by so doing it also threw away the political capital needed to accomplish the one admirable purpose it set out to achieve, which is to bring our hidden population out of the shadows and into the hopeful light through a legitimate process of inclusion and investment. Sadly, the sun has almost certainly set on comprehensive immigration reform and it will not rise again until there is a regime change in Washington, if then.
In the fullness of time history is a fair judge. It renders a verdict that stands as a testament to the ages and there is no fairer judge than that. A people are judged for what they did with their moment of opportunity. We have thus far squandered ours and now live in a world where hate sears our airwaves and pervades our public discourse. That must stop. I cannot accept that in my daughter’s golden years she will look at my time and ask herself why nobody halted the hatred before it could grow and consume us so that as the world heated up, so did human passions until they erupted from internal combustion. Hate is the ugliest thing, but it is not the most powerful thing. More powerful than hate by far is hope and I hope there is an end to hate. I hope.
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