When did we, as a country, become this cruel?

[Ocelot II]

19. We, as a collection of human beings, are no better than any other collection

of human beings that comprise a country. We are just as capable of cruelty as any other. We've done it before - the taking of land and the genocide of Native people, the abduction and enslavement of African people, Jim Crow laws, all manner of terrible behavior throughout our relatively short history. Our big mistake was gaslighting ourselves into thinking we were above and better than all the other countries who had committed such atrocities. Behold the Manifest Destiny doctrine by which we persuaded ourselves that we had the God-given right to take all that land that belonged to other people and inhabit and develop and farm it and profit from it. During our early years wealth was also derived from the stolen labor of others - not just the wealth of the Southern states, but that of the North, which bought the slave-harvested cotton and turned it into textiles and sold it in Northern cities. Our railroads were built by Asian laborers, not slaves but almost, until we decided we weren't going to allow those people to immigrate any more. We welcomed some immigrants but exploited and discriminated against others. Former slaves were just barely "liberated," but remained oppressed and poor.

All the while, we told ourselves that we were the exceptional country, the good guys, the country that won wars against evil empires. We patted ourselves on the back for defeating the Nazis, but we were so convinced of our superiority and indestructibility that we got sucked into fruitless, pointless, protracted wars in southeast Asia and the Middle East, from which we eventually slunk away while trying to pretend we hadn't been defeated. Have we become a cruel country? Trump made it socially acceptable to be cruel in public, but people will be cruel unless reminded that cruelty is ultimately destructive. Trump just let us take the mask off so we, collectively, could stop pretending to be better than the rest of the world.

With that in mind, those of us who don't think it's cool to be cruel should stop pretending the US was ever all that morally superior in the first place. Our job now is to shove the cruelty back into the closet, and expose the error of people who think being horrible to their fellow citizens and even more horrible to our immigrants will somehow prove the myth of American exceptionalism. We certainly can become better than we are now; Germany recovered from the Nazi regime that caused its near-destruction and became a prosperous democracy. I don't think I'll ever understand what motivates some people to take such pleasure in punching down, but we have to acknowledge the existence of that tendency in others (and maybe sometimes in ourselves) and resist it and keep resisting it. And call out the cruelty, every time.