Shameless
If we don’t want to be trapped in war, abroad and at home, we must recover our shame.
I come from a different time. I believe that there are certain things that one should be ashamed to say, let alone do. I guess that makes me a conservative.
We should be ashamed to say that some people can be hunted down in our streets because they’re poor.
And if we are not saying something to the contrary, in public, we are saying that we are good with it.
That is how consent works in a functioning democracy like ours.
If we don’t speak up, we are co-signing.1
A free people does not treat other people like garbage.
We have used these people. They have given us their labor. And now we are hunting them down at their job sites to throw them away like trash.
We should be ashamed of ourselves.
If you’re watching the daily videos, we are hunting down men, women, and children based on their skin color. And if you have not seen this, because you are reading the NYT, then that is shameful too.2
A lifesaver, not a weight.
In the past, shame has been used as a weapon to punish women, to punish the poor, to punish the gay, the dark skinned. The religious. The disabled. There are many ways to abuse shame.
But we Americans are abusing shame in the most horrific way possible: we are allowing ourselves to not feel any shame at all.
Anyone remember who our Secretary of Defense is?
Here’s a reminder:
This man had five affairs. Less than the POTUS.
Our shamelessness will be the death of us.
It is always that way.
That is what the First Amendment was meant to protect. ↩
All week long the NYT has erased the story of what is happening to Latinos in California. Scenes that would have been on the front page had it been Europeans in Manhattan who had overstayed their visas, are simply missing. Gone. A second disappearance. The first physical, the second moral. ↩