Today’s title, Latin for “Out of Many, One,” is the official motto of the United States and appears on its Great Seal and currency. It would follow, in principle, that bigotry, racial, religious, or ethnic, as it exists, is a cognitively dissonant phenomenon.
It is empirically undeniable that, other than its indigenous peoples, the American Nation is in large part, populated by immigrants and their progeny. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the dynamics of racial, religious, and ethnic prejudice have been a significantly regrettable feature of its national history. Despite the existence of legal strictures, the universal acceptance of metaphysically moral and humanistic principles, and the dedicated efforts of many self-sacrificing historical reformers, the disease of bigotry seems to be chronic in all its toxic virulence.
It is indisputable that all “prejudice” is empirically irrational, as it is not based on reason or actual experience. “Xenophobia, in our view, is not only repugnant, as are other contextual un-American and irrational ideations, but, as a singular matter, rightfully deserves the gold medal for ultimate absurdity.
“Xenophobia” connotes the fear or hatred of all persons perceived as “outsiders,” ranging from sub- rosa internalized feelings to programs of systemic violence. As to the latter, one can call to mind, as a recent illustration, the Gestapo-style tactics of the odious masked and heavily armed militia of rogue Americans (“ICE”), wreaking misery and homicide on subjectively perceived immigrants; the latter miscreants generously funded and sanctioned by the dystopic Trump Administration.
Stated simply, “immigrants” are persons who come to this country to live permanently, in most cases to improve the lives of their families, or as refugees from autocratic misery. The defined category does not encompass qualitative or descriptive characteristic, other than their expressed intention to live in the United States, We have eternally been at a complete loss in our efforts to comprehend the basis or etiology of those who would exalt the rationally unexplainable hatred or fear of entirely unknown “others,” who, like the tradition of past immigrants, come to this Nation to work and live better lives.
Donald J. Trump, in his demagogic descriptions of immigrants coming to America as “caravans of criminals and rapists,” tactically caters to the support of the Nation’s bigoted, inadequately educated, and uninformed populist voters; the latter, conceptually desirous of exalting their marginal public status as contrastingly accepted members of a restricted population. It is conceivable that such perceived recognition of status is the perverse dynamic of their toxic xenophobia. Aggravating such ignorance and neurotic presumption is the lack of empirical recognition of their own immigrant forebears.
Trump’s “Caravans of Undesirables” include many thousands of exemplary immigrants such as Yasha Heifetz, Albert Einstein, Victor Borge, Henry Kissinger, Elie Wiesel, James Audubon, Joseph Pulitzer, Alexander Graham Bell, Levi-Strauss, Madeleine Albright, and too many societally celebrated immigrants to pragmatically list in a brief writing.
Xenophobia, like other phobias, is, inarguably, neither healthy, just, nor productive. In our view, it is the most bizarre and “Looney Tunes” variety of bigotry, in that it is an expression of hatred singularly based upon an activity, viz., a change of homeland (irrespective of the class or ethnic identity of the victim). Can a rational explanation be furnished for the hatred of persons, solely castigated for their intention to change their family’s residence? No neurotically based personal grounds are postulated for this brand of prejudice, save the victim’s intention to live in another country. It makes as much (neurotic) sense as hating all bakers, baseball players, or bus commuters. Irrationally, such a sole, ()thematic “activity of immigration” provides the foundational basis of the hatred, generally analogous to the irrationality of race and ethnic prejudice, prevalent in other cases of unwarranted bias.
Construing a self-serving “pecking order” of humanity or irrational engagement in the hatred of racial or ethnic classes of people is humanistically and morally reprehensible and un-American. Bigotry based upon the victim’s legal choice of action is also reprehensible, and as well, empirically and dystopically irrational.
-p.
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