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This too shall pass
Jun. 16th, 2018 11:49 am I think what folks don't understand—intuitively speaking, I'm not assigning any sort of blame here—is that all laws, customs, and procedures were created by humans and can be undone by humans.
I posted the "You Can't Say That You Didn't Know" poster to Tumblr (I know, I'm opening myself up to a world of shit), and someone, quite reasonably, commented along the lines of "I know ICE are evil, but what do we with children in families who cross the border illegally?" They listed a bunch of bad options, such as keeping the families together in overcrowded prisons, leaving the kids alone and at the mercy of traffickers, etc.
It's kind of an obvious thing to wonder. Because to a young person (or even a middle-aged person with a regular, fallible memory), ICE has always existed. DHS has always existed. We have always had to take our shoes off at airports. And so on. But all of these have happened not just within my lifetime, but within the past two decades. Some authoritarian shitbag decided it was necessary and did it without asking the rest of the world whether it was a thing we needed.
Same with The Economy. If average people understood, even slightly, how the markets worked, they'd fucking revolt en masse. We talk about economics as though it's a force of nature rather than the product of human decisions made by people who are only slightly more qualified than I am to make those decisions, and in some case less so.
The best part of Yanis Varoufakis' talk that I saw last month was when he deconstructed the idea of economics as a science. If a weatherman with a reputation for accuracy makes a prediction that it will rain tomorrow, he may be right or wrong, but the prediction will not affect whether or not it rains. Whereas if an economist with an equally strong reputation makes a prediction that stocks will fall, this can affect whether they do or not. Because the former is a natural system, and the latter a human system. (On the quantum level, this is possibly less true, but I am not a scientist.)
One of the most fascinating phrases I hear all the time is, "the market is nervous," or "the market is jumpy," as if The Market is a mercurial, living beast that must be fed, frequently, with the blood of workers lest it go on a rampage. What they actually mean by this is that white men in suits are having feelings, and this will affect whether you have a job tomorrow or not.
It's easy to fall under the fallacy of natural order because we experience existence as individuals, and as individuals, we do have relatively little power. And as a culture—speaking of the West here, and North America in particular—we have been very carefully trained to avoid thinking of ourselves collectively in any unit beyond that of the family or nation state. And also, because our memories are short. I don't remember a time I didn't feel old and tired, but I must have not felt this way, once. Hell, when I started this blog—what, 15 years ago?—the tag "orwellian dystopias" actually made sense because the idea that mass surveillance was something undesirable was mainstream, rather than us happily giving up all our info to Big Zuck.
So when we ask, "what can be done about children separated from their families," the answer is, "stop detaining families at the border." Border patrol, borders, laws concerning the crossings of said borders, and even the current socioeconomic forces that have required families to flee their homes and attempt crossings of said borders, are all artificial phenomenon that we have very recently created, and none of them are inevitable or irreversible.
When we decide that there is nothing to be done about separating babies from their families and herding them into rape camps run by private military contractors in a disused Walmart with a fascistic mural of Donald Trump on the wall, we have not only entered the worst kind of cyberpunk dystopia, but we have forgotten that the forced separation policy has existed for a year or two, ICE has only existed since 2003, and Walmart, though around since the dinosaurs walked the Earth way back in 1962, has only really been in a position where it closes stores, leaving them to be converted into rape camps, in the past decade or so. Even Donald Trump, though it feels like he has reigned forever and probably will*, has only been president since 2017.
What I'm saying is that we don't need to simper or pray for half-measures. You could literally tear up the whole border policy and open the floodgates tomorrow and it wouldn't affect the average American one bit, except that you'd pay a bit less for fruit. It's not ordained by God, or natural laws, or any sort of complexity. Some dudes made decisions and you can make them undo it with just a little political will.
* I am pretty sure that if a Republican ran on the platform of, "no more of these pesky elections and uncomfortable talking about politics that spoils every Thanksgiving," he would win in a landslide.
I posted the "You Can't Say That You Didn't Know" poster to Tumblr (I know, I'm opening myself up to a world of shit), and someone, quite reasonably, commented along the lines of "I know ICE are evil, but what do we with children in families who cross the border illegally?" They listed a bunch of bad options, such as keeping the families together in overcrowded prisons, leaving the kids alone and at the mercy of traffickers, etc.
It's kind of an obvious thing to wonder. Because to a young person (or even a middle-aged person with a regular, fallible memory), ICE has always existed. DHS has always existed. We have always had to take our shoes off at airports. And so on. But all of these have happened not just within my lifetime, but within the past two decades. Some authoritarian shitbag decided it was necessary and did it without asking the rest of the world whether it was a thing we needed.
Same with The Economy. If average people understood, even slightly, how the markets worked, they'd fucking revolt en masse. We talk about economics as though it's a force of nature rather than the product of human decisions made by people who are only slightly more qualified than I am to make those decisions, and in some case less so.
The best part of Yanis Varoufakis' talk that I saw last month was when he deconstructed the idea of economics as a science. If a weatherman with a reputation for accuracy makes a prediction that it will rain tomorrow, he may be right or wrong, but the prediction will not affect whether or not it rains. Whereas if an economist with an equally strong reputation makes a prediction that stocks will fall, this can affect whether they do or not. Because the former is a natural system, and the latter a human system. (On the quantum level, this is possibly less true, but I am not a scientist.)
One of the most fascinating phrases I hear all the time is, "the market is nervous," or "the market is jumpy," as if The Market is a mercurial, living beast that must be fed, frequently, with the blood of workers lest it go on a rampage. What they actually mean by this is that white men in suits are having feelings, and this will affect whether you have a job tomorrow or not.
It's easy to fall under the fallacy of natural order because we experience existence as individuals, and as individuals, we do have relatively little power. And as a culture—speaking of the West here, and North America in particular—we have been very carefully trained to avoid thinking of ourselves collectively in any unit beyond that of the family or nation state. And also, because our memories are short. I don't remember a time I didn't feel old and tired, but I must have not felt this way, once. Hell, when I started this blog—what, 15 years ago?—the tag "orwellian dystopias" actually made sense because the idea that mass surveillance was something undesirable was mainstream, rather than us happily giving up all our info to Big Zuck.
So when we ask, "what can be done about children separated from their families," the answer is, "stop detaining families at the border." Border patrol, borders, laws concerning the crossings of said borders, and even the current socioeconomic forces that have required families to flee their homes and attempt crossings of said borders, are all artificial phenomenon that we have very recently created, and none of them are inevitable or irreversible.
When we decide that there is nothing to be done about separating babies from their families and herding them into rape camps run by private military contractors in a disused Walmart with a fascistic mural of Donald Trump on the wall, we have not only entered the worst kind of cyberpunk dystopia, but we have forgotten that the forced separation policy has existed for a year or two, ICE has only existed since 2003, and Walmart, though around since the dinosaurs walked the Earth way back in 1962, has only really been in a position where it closes stores, leaving them to be converted into rape camps, in the past decade or so. Even Donald Trump, though it feels like he has reigned forever and probably will*, has only been president since 2017.
What I'm saying is that we don't need to simper or pray for half-measures. You could literally tear up the whole border policy and open the floodgates tomorrow and it wouldn't affect the average American one bit, except that you'd pay a bit less for fruit. It's not ordained by God, or natural laws, or any sort of complexity. Some dudes made decisions and you can make them undo it with just a little political will.
* I am pretty sure that if a Republican ran on the platform of, "no more of these pesky elections and uncomfortable talking about politics that spoils every Thanksgiving," he would win in a landslide.
