Recently, I read that there are currently 70,000 people being held in Ice detention centers around the country, and that there have been over 1,000 human rights complaints lodged against ICE in the last year. I know that at least 30 people have died in ICE custody in that amount of time.
People can be so awful. What is it about the makeup of human beings that allows us to be horrible to each other? Big imaginations with no bounds on them? Our vision bigger than our hearts? Can it be that we just… can imagine enjoying being that cruel? It has to be more than that, doesn’t it?
It strikes me that the people who seem to enjoy torturing others are the people with the least amount of imagination, though. They have parameters for acceptability, and somehow those parameters include… torture, killing, creating human misery. Why?
You won’t be surprised, I hope, to hear that I haven’t got any answers: only questions.
Lately, the name Phineas Gage has come to mind quite a bit for me. You might remember him from your Psych 101 course. He’s the railroad worker who got into a terrible accident in which a railroad spike was driven through a region in his brain. The story goes that he recovered, but was a changed person: cruel, violent, always angry, whereas before the accident he was though of as kind and even generous.
I look at people like John Fetterman, who had been a well-thought-of Berniecrat, but who had a massive stroke during the year in which he ran for the Senate. Now he’s the most conservative member of the Democratic caucus in the Senate. Is it worth thinking about that a cruel nature comes about as a result of physical damage to the brain? I’m sure that’s a vast oversimplification, but it’s something that I think about constantly, and not just in considering what happened to Senator Fetterman.
I’m sure you can come up with examples yourselves of people who were kind when you knew each other at some younger phase of life, but who are now almost inconceivably changed. Can you track the changes in the person who comes to mind for you? Can you think of the points in their history where something changed them? Not always, I’m sure, but I imagine that, like me, you can point to certain things and see a connection in some personal histories.
And I’m not suggesting that the only reason that people become reactionary and harshly conservative is based on neurology. But maybe it plays a role, in some cases. Maybe in a lot of cases.
Why do so many of the people who are generating the cruelty in our society now claim to be Christians? I think this is a question worth asking now. How can the followers of the guy who proclaimed The Beatitudes be so far from those principles? And being so far from those principles, how can they expect that we would follow them into their depravity, demand it with the ferocity that they do?
I’m flummoxed, and I’m desperate to find some answers and a path forward.
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