The Cavalier Destruction of ‘Not Us’

By Joni Halpern

It is helpful growing old. The piling of decades of lived history and knowledge obtained over time gives a person a more holistic view of our national character. It becomes easier to see in today’s tapestry of American life the threads of earlier inclinations that resemble what we are now.

Today we are “cavalier,” a word that describes someone haughty or arrogant, someone with a careless disregard for serious matters.

We might have been described that way in our past as we annihilated the Native Americans; enslaved and brutalized Africans and their American-born descendants; exploited the Asian, European and Latin American immigrants who lived in poverty while staffing our factories and farms, or when we engaged in certain wars against
nations not out of necessity but out of our own hubris.

The Americans that supported the decision-makers in each of those cases were cavalier about the suffering caused by our actions. After all, the victims weren’t really “us.” Instead, they were “not us” – not white, not Christian, not born here — possessed, in other words, of characteristics that made them outsiders in the privileged circle of
Americans who consider themselves as sole beneficiaries of the freedoms promised in our beloved Constitution.

Today, we have other words for the outsiders: They are from “shit-hole” countries. They are members of drug cartels, however unverified. They are “woke,” “leftists,” “antifa,” paid radicals. They are illegal. They follow terrorist faiths. They are criminals, even if unproven. They are greedy, ambitious, and focused on replacing “us” by invasion and incessant reproduction.

Our leadership proudly officiates over the killing, imprisonment, torture, and deprivation of these outsiders, as if these crude and brutal actions are as insignificant as flicking a gnat off our sleeve. After all, we have not yet been touched personally by our nation’s utter disregard for human rights. The despised groups are “not us,” as we have established in the silos of rhetoric to which so many of us turn for approval.

With tears in our eyes, we sniffle through “God Bless America” and the Pledge of Allegiance at sporting and other events, as American leadership tattoos the old label of
“not us” on all whom we are encouraged by our leaders to dislike, miscomprehend, hate or fear. It is a ritual that has been part of our country’s most shameful heritage
since our earliest days as a nation.

Today, our cavalier disregard for the human rights of others is blessed by a cowardly Congress, a purposely misinformed electorate, and a Supreme Court majority that regards itself as elite and charged with the obligation to enforce against the unwealthy masses the domination of a “unitary President.”

In the tapestry we are now weaving that depicts how this moment in American life will be viewed in history, the bright golden threads of inalienable human rights will be
obscured by the rough-hewn, ragged yarns of suffering our country has willingly inflicted on human beings of whom we have permitted our leaders to dispose without so much as a shrug.

The tattoos will confirm, however, that the victims of our country’s savagery were “not us.”