From the front porch of Ruby Sales (March 24, 2020).

We are not at war. Rather we are facing a humanitarian crisis. Our lives and futures depend on knowing the difference

My friends this is a long read , but I believe that it is worthy of your time and consideration.

It is important to understand that we are not at war as Trump and others declared. Rather, we are facing a humanitarian crisis. You might wonder what difference does it make how we call it. In my estimation it makes a difference between life and death- who lives and who dies – as well as how we treat and value each other. Our answers to these questions determine our approach and solutions.

A war creates enemies/ us against them atmosphere. At its core wars are contentious and depend on hatred and anger towards one’s enemies. Wars promote and demand that we accept the idea that some people are collateral damage whose suffering and death are essential for a long term victory. In other words, wars require human sacrifice as necessary to redeem, restore and resurrect us as well as the nation into a new life.

A humanitarian crisis on the other hand creates neighbors rather than enemies. It creates an environment of caring compassion, regard, empathy and helpfulness towards each other. In other words, unlike wars a humanitarian crisis starts by reaffirming the value of every human being. Consequently, saving lives drives its mission and approaches to addressing and ending a crisis. Redemption, restoration, and resurrection in a humanitarian crisis emerge out of a life affirming ethic where ending human suffering, reaffirmation of community and our common connections as well as inspiring leaders to touch and feel the suffering, needs and humanity of others are the ingredients that bind us together in a beloved universal community.

During one of his press conferences, Trump asserted that the globe is up against a vicious enemy. With this declaration, he turned a humanitarian crisis into a war where a virus becomes an enemy with a human face.

Days later the governor of Texas followed Trump’s declaration of war with the chilling remark that grandparents should be willing to die for their grandchildren and the good of the economy. Implicit in this remark is the accusation that if grandparents are not willing to make the ultimate sacrifice of dying to save the lives of their grandchildren as well as the life of the nation, they are dangerous enemies of both. Instead of requiring grandchildren and grandparents to focus on the the virus as the crisis, it shifts the source and cause of fear, angst and desire to survive away from it towards the grandparents .

Does this sound familiar?

In this scenario grandparents are no longer victims of this crisis as are their grandchildren. Rather it turns them into predators who want to live off of the backs and suffering of the young and the nation. Their children are victims of their greedy and selfish desire to live!

Trump’s war call and consciousness of othering have begun to infiltrate the hearts and discourse of some members of the Republican Party. Larry Kudlow for example outright stated that it will be necessary to sacrifice some lives in order to save others. His message expands the group of sacrificial lambs to include larger groups of people. His declaration raises several socio ethical questions. Who decides who are the ones who should sacrifice their lives and bodies so that the most deserving should live? Who are the beneficiaries of the sacrifice or who is the most worthy? What values and assumptions drive these decisions?

I don’t know about you but this nation’s history of White male power that is rooted in purity codes is enough to make me pause and interrogate the theme and subtext of their message. History teaches us that this is not a message that was promoted by extremists or misfits. Rather so called normal people such as academicians, politicians, activists and practitioners used it to shape a eugenics movement based on the idea of inferior and superior genes to determine who was worthy assets and who were unworthy liabilities? For them, groups with inferior genes threatened the short term and long term health and well being of the culture of Whiteness and the continuity of the superior WASP Nordic ethnic group.

These following passages by Edwin Black provide us with a sobering framework for understanding the dangerous rhetoric as well as the socio spiritual and political world view that shape Trump’s reduction of this humanitarian crisis into a war.

Throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Americans and untold numbers of others were not permitted to continue their families by reproducing. Selected because of their ancestry, national origin, race or religion, they were forcibly sterilized, wrongly committed to mental institutions where they died in great numbers, prohibited from marrying, and sometimes even unmarried by state bureaucrats. Black, Edwin, WAR AGAINST THE WEAK: EUGENICS AND AMERICAN’S CAMPAIGN, Dialog Press, 2003

Black continues by observing that “In America, this battle to wipe out whole ethnic groups was fought not by armies with guns nor by hate sects at the margins. Rather, this pernicious white-gloved war was prosecuted by esteemed professors, elite universities, wealthy industrialists and government officials colluding in a racist, pseudoscientific movement called eugenics. The purpose: create a superior Nordic race. To perpetuate the campaign, widespread academic fraud combined with almost unlimited corporate philanthropy to establish the biological rationales for persecution. Employing a hazy amalgam of guesswork, gossip, falsified information and polysyllabic academic arrogance, the eugenics movement slowly constructed a national bureaucratic and juridical infrastructure to cleanse America of its “unfit.” Specious intelligence tests, colloquially known as IQ tests, were invented to justify incarceration of a group labeled “feebleminded.”.. Black, IBID

Black calls out the systemic and social spiritual forces that drove the Eugenic movement with this observation. “ Although much of the persecution was simply racism, ethnic hatred and academic elitism, eugenics wore the mantle of respectable science to mask its true character. The victims of eugenics were poor urban dwellers and rural “white trash” from New England to California, immigrants from across Europe, Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Native Americans, epileptics, alcoholics, petty criminals, the mentally ill and anyone else who did not resemble the blond and blue-eyed Nordic ideal the eugenics movement glorified.” IBID

It is very striking as to how much of this history still remains and manifest itself in the spirit and language that define Trump and and his companions approach to handling this pandemic.

It remains because is is a tactic that the guardians of Whiteness know works because they have successfully socialized it within White Americans . From the womb to the tomb they are taught that White survival, identity, well being and rights require them to constantly be at war with dangerous others because of inherent moral, physical defects that contaminate Whiteness.