In that one sentence is the tragedy of centuries. This is trump-america.
It is a strange thing, watching history in real time.
As I sit in my Vancouver home, I feel the chill of déjà vu as I read about ICE patrolling Chicago streets, dragging people into disappearance, arresting them because of their skin tone, demanding identity papers, and then charging fines for not carrying that small slip of permission.
We have seen this before.
When American slaves needed a white man’s paper to walk the lanes.
When a two-percent minority in South Africa controlled eighty percent of the land and ruled ninety-eight percent of the people through fear and loathing.
When Hitler vanished Jews under a regime that catalogued their deaths as efficiently as it ticked off boxes on a to-do checklist.
Ethnic cleansing. One by one, family by family, town by town, country by country.
These “cleansings” always begin with language, with laws, and with neighbours turning a blind eye.
We swore never again, and yet here we are.
Again.
Victims often become victimisers; trauma makes us mirror the abuser. But the most callous act on earth is when the once-victimised decide to bully and exterminate a people who did nothing to them.
These “victims” who thrive on their foreparents’ suffering are nothing more than bullies, and like all bullies, they attack from fear.
Their greatest terror is exposure: that the world might see how weak, insecure, and pitiful they truly are.
The United States which once defined itself by fairness and protection, now has its own citizens hiding from the state as if from a foreign invader.
America the great, the self-appointed guardian of liberty, the so-called leader of the free world, has its own cities, like Chicago, living in fear.
The blue jacket of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids homes before dawn, detains parents without trial, and scatters children into foster systems they may never escape.
Latino, African, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Black Americans are the only ones being treated as criminals and trespassers. Swathes of Chicago has gone into hiding for one reason only, their rich melanin.
And just when you think it cannot get worse, then there’s that one moment, that one line that tell ya how bad it is.
A Black man, watching a brother being choked by ICE agents, shouts: “Y’all supposed to be choking Mexicans.”
Oppression is not only physical; it is psychological warfare refined through ages.
Divide and conquer began with swords and flags but evolved into ideology, propaganda, and algorithm.
It seeps into the mind, teaching people to mistrust one another, to crave hierarchy, to worship their captors.
That’s the evil genius of oppression, it makes people police themselves.
It convinces the broken that they are safe only when kneeling with bowed heads.
This is the same sickness that breeds Stockholm syndrome on a societal scale: when the abused defends the abuser, when the oppressed believes the oppressor’s story, when the caged grow fond of their cage because freedom has been made to look like chaos.
The victims change, the languages differ, yet the choreography of cruelty remains in the checkpoints, the curfews, the dispossession, the willing complicity by all citizens.
Think about this for a second…what happened in plantations, townships, and camps, sparsely recorded in old tomes…now flickers on screens in real time in the palms of our hands.
But what do we do?
We swipe left on reality and we swipe right for distraction.
We like to tell ourselves history had been witnessed, recorded, mourned, and laid to rest. But while we dig up its bones – the mass graves of children – new graves are being dug, filled, and covered up.
Those who profited off the mantle of the oppressed now wield the tools of oppression.
Those who once preached liberty now install the cages.
The ghosts of slavery, apartheid, and the holocaust is no longer at the edges of our reality, in the history books as we so foolishly believed, they have evolved as a fluency in bureaucracy, that is justified by law and sanitised by euphemism.
What a waste of a life when we bury our heads in the sand while the annihilators kick our exposed behinds, begging to be made into a bloody pulp.
That’s why, at the end of the day, I believe Bots might be better than us…at least Bots only follow the program installed.
We, on the other hand, choose our submission.