On March 15, three planes touched down in El Salvador. They carried 261 men deported from the United States. Most were Venezuelans—people who fled one nightmare only to be thrust into another. They were designated as “gang members” by the current administration and deported with little or no due process. No trials. No evidence presented. Just labeled, processed, and removed.
What happened next should shatter any comfortable notions of what American values mean in practice.
These men—human beings with names, histories, dreams—were marched through a gauntlet of armed guards, beaten, stripped naked, shaved, and thrown into overcrowded cells. A photojournalist on the scene described watching men age a decade in two hours. He watched as one young man sobbed, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” This man was slapped for his tears, beaten for his vulnerability.
No phone calls. No visitors. No books. No talking. Just exile to a place “so cold and far from home they may as well have been sent into space, nameless and forgotten.”
And all of this—every slap, every sob, every stolen dignity—stamped with American approval. Coordinated with American officials. Executed with American efficiency.
Full text on Tech Dirt (who would have thought).
To me, it means a general sense of shame.
I’m glad I live in a place of general abundance and I have everything I need and some of what I want, but being someone who reads extensively, I keep finding myself learning things that were deliberately withheld from me in the public school curriculum and I understand why the rest of the world hates us. (Some examples, the Tulsa Massacre, the Battle of Blair Mountain, railway strikes in the 1800’s, etc.)
I don’t stand up for the national anthem either, because even though I was born here, this country doesn’t represent the values important to me. (living wages, health care, leaving people the fuck alone even if they’re a different religion, etc.)
It’s punctuated every election season, when I watch 49% of Americans make excuses for genocide, poverty, and endless war while the other 49% pretends to give a shit just because the other team’s guy is currently in charge. There’s never any meaningful self-reflection by either 49% in the wake of massive negative change.
