It occurred to me as I was walking in a park somewhere, I can’t remember which one, that deporting people we don’t like has a long history, dating back to at least the start of the Christian era. In fact, Jesus was the ultimate deportee. I don’t know much except what I have forgotten from Sunday school at my mother’s Presbyterian church; however, it’s not hard to imagine that the authorities of that time (I think they were Romans?) hated any rabblerouser who could rouse a rabble that might threaten the regime.
All the paintings notwithstanding, I’m pretty sure Jesus had brown skin and brown eyes. All the locals did back then—it was the Middle East, for crying out loud. Further, although the ancient Romans who killed Jesus might not have been as White as our homegrown Christian White supremacists, odds are the Romans were whiter than Jesus. Choosing to marginalize a group by skin color is a time-tested excuse when that group holds an undesirable ideology, especially if the group is growing in numbers and power.
So it’s not hard to see why Jesus got some flak. I’m not a Christian, but even I can see the guy was doomed.
“Go back to where you came from” probably started around that time. It’s comical that not too long after he was extinguished, he once again crossed the border. That is, the border between heaven and earth, if there is such a border, to which I personally do not subscribe but I hear many earthlings do.
In other words, he was an immigrant, he got deported, and like so many have done since, he returned to try again.
Nowadays, he’d be detained in a concentration camp for a few years before he was finally expelled, but you get my drift. My drift is that I’m pissed off.
I can hear you complaining already: But Carol, all these undocumented immigrants with brown skin aren’t Jesus! They are criminals and thugs, fathers and uncles, mothers and brothers, and yes, some are children, we admit, but we don’t want them here. They threaten our comfortable bubble. They’re not like us. They’re brown!
Again, I’m not a Christian, and I’m sure not a Biblical scholar, but isn’t there a thing in that book somewhere about showing compassion for foreigners because most of us (with the notable exception of Native Americans [who also were “deported” to concentration camps, which we call reservations, because of the color of their skin] were foreigners once ourselves? Or our ancestors were. Mine came from the whitest part of England, so there’s no mistaking me for having Italian, Greek, or Asian heritage.
Which means I might escape the pogroms, but I digress.
Humans are so predictable, but it’s not our fault. We are hard-wired to protect self, family, tribe, and nation, in that order. Anyone who threatens self, family, tribe, or nation must be repelled—and preferably destroyed. The fear of welcoming strangers is no match for the existential fear of losing what you have (wealth and power) or not getting what you want (wealth and power).
Fox and Fanatics co-anchor Brian Kilmeade said mentally ill homeless people should be executed by lethal injection. I’m sure many hold similar views, especially when they see their neighborhoods overrun with tents, trash, and broken down RVs. Just kill them all. It’s a neat solution to a messy problem. It wouldn’t be all that hard. We could just put something in the water at the gas station where they fill up their water jugs. They wouldn’t feel a thing.
Alternatively, we could bash in their car windows, pull them out by their hair, throw them on the ground (after tasing them a few times), put them in zipties, and then detain them in concentration camps, where they receive little food and no medical care. If they survive that, then we’ll spend millions of taxpayer dollars to send them to a jail in a foreign country where they don’t speak the language. Pat on the back, job well done, here’s your medal of freedom.
Then we’ll go golfing while the nation implodes.
Angry, much?