Redemption for our sins

A good reason to let immigrants in more easily (and for people to sneak in, if they have no other option).

Persecuted Gays Seek Refuge in the U.S., Foreigner's Abuse Increasingly Seen as Grounds for Asylum

One of the reasons why freedom should be taken seriously, as the most important "rule", I think, is because we really, generally, have no clue what is going on in peoples' lives and what they have been through. If I had a friend in this situation - s/he's been abused or persecuted in another country and he needs to get somewhere to escape that abuse or persecution - I would encourage him to seek asylum. But I would have no issue, at all, with him living in the U.S. and would take him in until he could complete asylum petitions. And I'd let them stay if there was any realistic reason that they might be rejected.

I hope people can understand, then, given the risks that come with applying for asylum in such cases or a million such cases, why people would rather live under the radar rather than making themselves visible and therefore more likely to be sent back to so many miserable conditions that they might be subject to if sent home.

We are a mean-spirited lot, often, aren't we? People, I mean.

We get better. Slowly. We hear more stories like this. We develop more empathy and compassion and, maybe, if our tiny little hearts can bear it, love. We become more decent. We identify with peoples' humanity and not just our sad, small little slice of it. Why would anyone identify with "Americans" but not with "humanity"? What purpose could such a narrow idea of common identity have for any of us?

Our best humanity is not found in liberals or conservatives or Democrats or Republicans or socialists or religious folks or radicals or terrorists. And our worst humanity is not found in liberals or conservatives or Democrats or Republicans or romantic communists or racists or Clintonistas or the Bush Administration.

Our best and worst humanity is found in all of us. Without exception, really. It's the one rule of humanity I can count on. All that is best and worst in humanity is in all of us. Which makes it all the more important for us to embrace what is best and worst in us, not try to repress it.

And it makes it all the more incumbent for us to embrace the compassion that makes us stronger and more decent and more loving and more functional and better people for it. None of us are or should try to be superior to others. But all of us aspire or should aspire to be better than we were the day before and to be the best human being we can be and the best possible in our lifetimes.

And no matter how we might try to make excuses otherwise, that means having a heart. And being decent to people because it's the right thing to do, regardless of what the law or the rules say.

I have no truck with people who use laws like fugitive slave laws and the Nuremberg laws and laws against adultery, sodomy, homosexuality, race mixing, and so many laws that have represented everything that is ugly about humanity to justify their ugliness.

Justify your ugliness all you want, I say. You'll find no justification with me.

Follow the law as best you can, is the only advice I can give. But take that conscience of your's more seriously than any law could ever offer any of us.

Because when the Nazis come to my hometown, I'm hiding Jews. And when the South rises again, I'm helping slaves escape. And when Islamic Fundamentalists or Communists are successful in outlawing every decent impulse that people might have in the name of ridding the world of its various ills, I'm resisting, legal or not.

The law is not the final arbiter of morality or decency or goodness. The law is an all-too-neutral arbiter of whatever prejudices or impulses or ugliness guide us this week or this year or this historical period.

I wish law reflected reason. I would like for that to be so. I will work for that to be so.

But you only have to watch the political process for a few evenings a week to see what a godforesaken, foolish, dysfunctional, repressive mess the whole exercise is, as a rule.

And it's not a mess because politicians in Washington are uniquely a mess and us noble savages in the citizenry are really where decency and goodness is found.

It's a mess because we're a mess. Humanity. One long, foolish, repressive mess.

We get better. Slowly. Very slowly.

And then we have periods like this one where we kind of go off the rails.

Maybe showing some decency to gay people escaping persecution is the least we can do to make up for our shittiness.

Love,
Ben