Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do...
-John Lennon, fatally shot 12/8/1980
Blurry Photo © Carol Bergman taken through tears at the Central Park Memorial
My parents had left Haiti in the middle of a thirty-year dictatorship during which most people were being terrorized. A woman or girl being raped or even killed was not all that unusual.
-Edwidge Danticat, All the Home You've Got
If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.
― Machiavelli, The Prince
When a war starts, if citizens are forced to become soldiers, they learn to shoot a gun and to kill soldiers on the "other side." If they cannot shoot their guns, they run the risk of being killed themselves. Nobody cares whether a soldier enjoys killing other people, it is just a job, or more than a job because as they are killing, they are keeping themselves—and maybe even their family—alive . Women and children are left behind unless they have volunteered to fight, which is glorious and laudable and heroic at times, for example in Ukraine right now. Or women and children are evacuated, or they decide to flee and travel long distances to find safety, either on foot, or in a vehicle of some description, or across a body of water in boats and planes, and they may never return to their homeland, or want to return. Which is my family's story once they took flight from what they always assumed would be their home, but was no longer their home. They were welcomed to the United States as refugees and sent to Wyoming for some reason I cannot find out, and my father—who was already an eye surgeon—worked in a hospital and my mother—who had finished medical school but not done her internship—became a visiting nurse.
That was then and this is now. What we are witnessing in the round-ups and deportations is not just a reckoning with what everyone agrees is a broken immigration system, and far too many seeking safety in a country that is no longer safe, it is an attempt to redefine what America is, beyond its mythology, and what it will become if the vicious cruelty taking hold is not stopped.
Can you think of a nation that has not been touched by killing in recent years or, at the very least, internal economic strife, or worse? A nation so peaceful that children have never seen a gun, heard the sound of bombs, or gone to sleep hungry? Can we include American-born children in this list of formative experiences? What has the cohort in Washington done with their children I wonder? Have they built fall-out shelters and bunkers to protect them in the event of the final apocalyptic event? Or, bought them bullet proof vests to wear in school? What do they discuss with them at the dinner table? How do they explain the promise of America?
Act like a madman and no one will trust you or dare vengeance, Machiavelli suggested.
The Prince has taken him at his word.