I read an article online today on what Anne Frank's arrest might have been like, and it made me think about the parallels between the plight of European Jews during WWII, and that of the immigrant children who have come to the United States seeking safety and a chance at life. The Diary of Anne Frank was one of my favorite books as a kid. Every time I think of her and her family, my heart breaks again for them; for what they lost; for her father who had EVERYTHING taken from him. Imagine a world where CHILDREN in danger are arrested for being of a particular religion!
The dehumanization of the Jews was a tactic that Nazis used make it easy for people to look the other way when their neighbors were carted off to die. It was also a reminder to those who were NOT Jews that the Nazis could decide to come for them next, so they had better toe the line. Throughout history, this particular tactic has been used to give a cover of immunity to those who would enslave millions of African people and ship them all over the world like sacks of beans to be bought and sold. It was the foundation for the stronghold that slavery maintained in the American South long after it had been abolished everywhere else. It was done to the Native Americans, making it seem totally OK to murder their children and steal their land. It was done to Aborigines so that the vast island that is Australia could be stolen in the name of a king. They weren't made "citizens" of their OWN country until 1967. Dehumanization stoked the fire that was apartheid in South Africa, and it burned away 27 years of Nelson Mandela's life.
Now imagine a world where children in danger are, for all intents and purposes, arrested for being from the wrong country. Whatever the circumstances of their arrival, the likelihood is that if their skin color was white, their hair blond, and their language European, no one would advocate turning them away. But they are not. They are brown-skinned children who speak Spanish and come from places like El Salvador. According to many, this automatically means they are criminals who want to "steal, drain, defraud, etc." They are DANGEROUS! They are....less than human. If we do not learn from the atrocities of the past, we WILL continue to repeat them.
It is a well known fact that the United States has a long, sordid history of supporting treachery against people considered "minorities." As the Information Age gives us greater access to those things that were previously relegated to dark corners and hidden archives, it is enough to rival the bloodiest horror flick or the most frightening dystopian novel. For example, did you know that the US government sanctioned the forced sterilization of Native American women in this country? It came to light in the 1970s. There are documented cases of more than 3,000 women across various tribes who had their insides ripped out by physicians who decided that they were too subhuman to make choices about their own reproductive health. But, according to Trinity International University's Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity, statistics showed a sharp decline in Native American birth rates that went back as far as the 1960s. It is likely that the cases that are known are just the tip of the iceberg. The irony is that both the Europeans who came to this land, and their subsequent ancestors, called the Native Americans "savages." The roots of savagery lie in the belief that skin color and birthplace equal genetic superiority. Their willingness to rape, maim, purposely spread deadly disease, murder women and children, etc., so they could steal what didn't belong to them clearly demonstrate that THEY were the monsters.
It would be both immoral and INHUMAN to forget what they were forced to endure. How many native peoples were hunted to near extinction and then cordoned off into reservations, which for all intents and purposes, is a fancy word for "human zoo." How many lives and generations were stolen? Many of the women who had their uteri ripped out without their knowledge were teenage girls or young women of childbearing age. Many of them are STILL alive, and they have no children or grandchildren who share their blood. They have had to wake up every day knowing that the God-given ability that most women take for granted was stolen from them by doctors whom they were told had come to HELP them. They were doubly violated because this practice was green-lighted by a government that had already taken everything else their people physically owned. It wasn't enough to take their homes, their lands, and their way of life? The BABIES had to be taken, too???
Black and Latino women were also victimized in the 20th Century by the practice of government-sanctioned sterilization. According to Psychology Today, North Carolina sterilized nearly 8,000 people between 1929 and 1974 for multiple reasons, including findings by authorities that they were lazy, promiscuous, or poor. State records show that North Carolina's sterilization program targeted welfare recipients. During the last 15 years of its existence, 99 percent of the victims were women, and more than 60 percent were Black. A 2013 Huffington Post article stated that between 1909 and 1979, California sterilized at least 20,000 people. Latinos were disproportionately targeted. California's cases alone account for roughly 30% of all known eugenic sterilizations in the US during the 20th Century.
We have to remember how people have suffered in and FOR this country. We have to remember what it looks like when we lose sight of our humanity so we can clearly identify injustice as soon as it rears its ugly head. In the words of George Santayana, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
In this video, Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL) tells one of his constituents that he does not support raising the federal minimum wage because it will "hurt the economy" and it will drive up costs. He then goes on to say that the minimum wage isn't supposed to be a LIVING wage, and asks who will pay for it, if we make it one? A man in the audience raised his hand and said he would be fine with paying 20 cents more for a hamburger. The congressman really had nothing to say to that. You know why? Because at the end of the day, for most big corporations, a living wage translates into only slight increases in the actual costs to their customers.
That's the point that they don't want emphasized. So people like Ross engage in fear mongering and trying to scare people into believing that a living wage means someone undeserving is taking something away from working people, and that suddenly, milk will be $20 a gallon. Here's a newsflash, congressman. People making minimum wage ARE working people! The economy needs contributors at ALL levels. Not everyone has the resources or opportunities to be white collar workers. And people's lives are not worth less because they make fries or wash dishes to pay their bills.
At the end of the day, what those who oppose a federal living wage really want is to maintain the medieval system of feudalism in which the wealthy are lords of the manor, and the poor are serfs. During the time of feudalism, it was rare for a serf to be educated. In fact, it usually only happened with express permission from the lord. In some places it was banned outright because lords felt that if serfs were educated, they would start questioning the way things were done. The same line of thinking was used to rationalize and justify banning the education of slaves in the United States. An educated slave who could read and write would have the means to learn that despite what he had been told, he was a human being and slavery itself was a barbaric institution that was based on racism, an ignorant belief in the inherent supremacy of whites, and a desire to line pockets with profits off the backs of unpaid laborers.
Clearly, the same feudalistic thought process is being applied today in these arguments against raising the minimum wage. The "hurting the economy" reasoning is just smoke and mirrors. The real fear is that raising the minimum wage means raising the socio-economic status of certain classes of people. It means low-income Blacks, Latinos, Asians and even whites would again have access to a middle class lifestyle. They'll be able to move into neighborhoods that currently are out of their price range. They will be able to educate themselves and their children. And most importantly, this new knowledge will make it clear that things are not how they should be. Education also gives people the ability to influence the world around them instead of just being a servant to it. People like Ross don't want poor people to step outside their predetermined place in the pecking order because it undermines the economic and political power structure that allows a wealthy few to be in charge. They don't want poor folks asking questions, running for offices, giving educated news interviews or challenging the status quo. They don't want poor kids getting the idea that the American dream actually applies to them. So they spit out this nonsense about how the SCARY the idea of a living minimum wage is. They want what's left of the middle class to despise and go to war with the poor. That way the two groups they fear the most are no longer a threat.
We should question the intelligence and the very humanity of anybody who wants us to believe only a few are deserving of a life outside of poverty or the chance to succeed on a level playing field. What that really means is that they consider themselves the lords and the rest of us the serfs, so the kind of lives we have should be left up to their discretion. The last time I checked, this is not medieval Europe. And it certainly isn't pre-Civil War America. We have to ask ourselves, if the poor and the middle class are at war, who's watching the rich? That's right. NO ONE.
