I just finished reading an article in the Times about the treatment of detained illegal immigrants, and I am sitting here in tears. I don't exactly know what to do....the inhumanity of the world is sometimes overwhelming to me. Perhaps it is just that the 24 hour news culture perpetuates the feeling that the sky is falling, I don't know. But the fact that we let people suffer like that poor man Mr. Ng makes me despair for humanity. The crimes we perpetuate against those who are supposedly "not like us" - the process of dehumanization that is necessary to treat people like chattel, turns my stomach upside down. Part of the problem here, I think, is that we only see people as deserving of rights if they are like "us" - and in this case, that means, if they are American. What I don't understand is how to solve this problem - to get individuals and societies to view humans as valuable in their own right, not because of their national status. It's ironic to me that when I watch the Olympics, that most nationalistic of sporting events, I think to myself that at heart, people really are fundamentally similar. Those athletes often seem to me to have more in common as athletes than differences based on the team uniform they wear. I will try to avoid sounding insipid, but after a Russian and a Georgian athlete embraced at the end of an event (I think it was sharpshooting), one of them said, if nations behaved more like Olympians, there would be no war. And I know that many educated people would sit around and analyze that and say how trite and silly it was, but I think maybe they're all a little too jaded, and it's that jadedness that prevents change. Why not conceive of each and every other human as equal to us (unless and until they do something to prove themselves unworthy of humanity ala Hitler, Stalin, janjaweed, etc.). It seems to me that the fundamental assumption is always that "we" are better and more deserving than the "other" - thus we hear about American casualties of war (which are horrible, terrible, and undeserved), but not about Iraqi casualties (which are equally horrible, terrible, and undeserved). The people who are dying all have mothers, brothers, sisters, wives, children. That pain hurts, no matter who feels it.
I was struck by a piece on NPR in which Coco Wang, a graphic artist who detailed some of the most heartrending stories about the Chinese earthquake, described how her British friends were surprised at the level of emotion and love displayed by the Chinese after the earthquake. They thought, she said, that the Chinese were cold and emotionless. She had to point out to them that they are people, just like them, who have emotions and feel just the same as they do. It's that kind of recognition that might begin the process of understanding that we cannot torture or kill people simply because they aren't American, (or German, or Chinese, etc.).
Mr. Ng's wife and sons surely hope that we can start this process. It's unbelievable.