On May 19th a pregnant woman and her four-year old son arrived at Dulles International Airport coming from Ghana., She had a valid tourist visa to bring her son to the U.S. for medical treatment, but something unexpected happened when they landed. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents questioned the purpose of her trip, and for unknown reasons, locked her and her son in a windowless room at the airport with only a single bed, toilet, and sink. They spent ten days there until a federal judge ordered they be released immediately, after ACLU intervened.
The ACLU lawyer said, “She’s just one of a number of pregnant people who’ve been detained in shocking numbers in the wake of President Trump’s executive order trying to end birthright citizenship.” In another tragic incident a woman who was being deported to Honduras pleaded with authorities to allow her toddler to come with her, but they refused. That child ended up dead after being given to an abusive relative. There are many stories like this, and they speak directly to the abundant evil that has become endemic in this country, and elsewhere.
In another horrific example, there are several state legislators who have sponsored or supported bills and amendments to classify abortion as homicide. Four of them are from southern states where some women who suffered miscarriages have been imprisoned for assumed abortions. Women whose pregnancies are non-viable are frequently forced to wait until they are critically ill or die before medical intervention.
The brutal actions of ICE and its colluders make that kind of cruelty clear, as the videos we see prove, including the murders of innocent people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Take what has been happening in so-called detention centers like Delaney Hall in New Jersey, where there is abundant evidence of abuse. When Rep. Dan Goldman was allowed to visit that dreadful place, he heard about worms and maggots in food, no clean drinking water, overflowing sewage, and reports of sexual abuse. It’s a common story in victim testimonies from all ICE facilities. One protester at Delaney said seven ambulances came to the facility in four hours, perhaps connected to the routine beating of detainees he cited.
“How can this many people work at this facility and watch what happens inside these walls and say nothing?” he asked. It’s a good question and one that leads us to a larger discussion about the nature of evil and why it’s growing.
How indeed did so many men in high places involve themselves in Jeffrey Epstein’s monstrous cruelty and evil abuse of women and girls. Why don’t we know the full extent of his unimaginable crimes, and others like it. Why are judges allowing young sexual abusers to get away with their crimes? How are so many legislators allowing children diagnosed with cancer to suffer and die when ongoing scientific research is having an impact on incidence, prevalence and prevention of diseases that are on the brink of amelioration or cure for all of us? How does a government with bundles of money for personal gain and vanity projects do such things as ending food assistance, housing help, and access to healthcare?
White America has always had a predilection for doing evil things to certain groups of people. Slavery and the abuse suffered by Native Americans are just two examples. But the exacerbation of what we are witnessing now is stunning.
The propensity for evil is not just an American problem. We only need to witness the genocide happening at the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu in Palestine, Lebanon, and beyond. A recent New York Times piece by Nicholas Kristof called “The Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” based on survivor testimonies, reveals what happens to prisoners, male, female, or child, and it is unfathomable. Described as “utter savagery” in a United Nations report called “More Than a Human Can Bear” unthinkable depravity is cited. Just one example: it exposes the use of “trained dogs for raping Palestinian prisoners.”
So what are we to make of such depravity and evil? Are we mutating as a species devoid of humanity and compassion? Is political narcissism to blame? Is the Internet depersonalizing us?
The philosopher Hannah Ahrent, who coined the term “the banality of evil,” may help us deconstruct the preponderance of evil thoughts, proclivities, and actions.
Ahrendt attended the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She was also one of the first people to discover what had happened in the camps, which she called “corpse factories.” When she watched the Nuremberg trials, she thought the Nazis had “exploded the limits of law,” adding, “We’re never going to be able to put this genie back in the bottle.”
Eichman, she said, was banal, pompous, thoughtless, and self-important (sound familiar?). He made the evil he perpetrated and symbolizes more difficult to counter, Ahrendt posited. Lyndsey Stonebridge, a professor of Humanities and Human rights in England, adds to that. She points out that Eichman was a lot like Trump. “He couldn’t grasp the world that was full of plural, different people, so he determined to eliminate certain peoples.” Ahrendt said that his thoughtless evil “got into culture and spread like fungus.”
Ending the brutality we face as we try to rid ourselves of individual people and organized entities that choose to engage in evil acts won’t be easy, but it’s been done before. Perhaps in this moment the words of Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein victim, will guide us as we “hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected, victims are treated with compassion, not shamed, and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else.” It’s a start.