We should resist the urge to find scapegoats in harried campaign
Presidential election campaigning has become neverending. Like the weather and the Kardashians, it won’t go away, so we alternately ignore it, talk about it because we can’t think of anything else to discuss, or get spun up about it. This month finds us pretending it has beginnings and endings.
The President has held campaign rallies pretty much nonstop since 2015, but he gathered a host of faithful followers in Orlando last Tuesday for the official launch of his 2020 reelection drive. Next week the small host of would-be Democratic challengers will face off in debates ahead of primary election season.
Democratic candidates have put forth various economic and environmental proposals as well as ideas for handling thorny issues like those surrounding immigration and student debt. The President pretty much guaranteed this past week, however, that no matter what anyone else says, he will set the tone for the next 18 months. On Monday, via Twitter, he announced mass deportations of those he considers illegal or inadequately documented residents, and on Tuesday in Orlando he railed against the myriad villains out to destroy America and had his supporters chanting their old slogans, “Build that wall!” and, “Lock her up!”
We do need walls, actually, not so much to keep out refugees and asylum seekers as to prevent water from overwhelming our low-lying cities. So say the major financial backers of companies that insure property and businesses in those cities. New York City officials believe they need at least $10 billion for protective measures, including a sea wall to keep Lower Manhattan from flooding. Dozens more cities along the Atlantic and
Gulf coasts will need billions as well to hold off rising sea levels. We can’t afford to protect them all, so before long we’ll witness emergency room triage on a grand scale.
These water walls likely won’t become campaign issues, however. They’re no fun. Since we don’t demonize oceans and seas as did our early ancestors, we’ll not hear chants about keeping the water out. It’s infinitely more thrilling and motivating to identify scapegoats and vilify them. If it weren’t for those people, all would be great again! Crank up that kind of rhetoric for a few months and eventually most everyone will fixate on a “those people” we’re ready to load onto the first truck out.
We all know how to hate, and it takes hard work to keep from intoxicating ourselves with it. One who understands both the difficulty and necessity of that work is Leonard Pitts, Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald, who has published a new novel titled, “The Last Thing You Surrender.” Set during WWII, its readers experience vicariously all the dehumanizing poison and violence of the segregated Jim Crow era, the brutality and horrors of war, and the systematic degradation of life in a
POW camp. The last thing you surrender? Humanity itself. Give up on decency, dignity, compassion, and charity, and you have become the enemy you hate.
We’re not at war. Yet. But the refusal to surrender our humanity will likely prove a major challenge in this next stretch of our endless campaigning. Perhaps individuals can’t re-direct the public discourse, but we can commit ourselves to critical efforts like the education and general welfare of every child in our community, even if some look like “those people.” We can also work together locally to learn from immigrants and lean on the strengths of newcomers who don’t look or sound like us. Most likely, when all that water finds us — and it will — we’ll need all the help we can get.