Remember when nobody had a cell phone? Then there were a few, but they were weird, and they seemed like they were probably expensive. And why would you need one anyway? Can’t you just take your calls at home? Then you had one and you couldn’t remember how you lived without it. Then everyone had one. And then they started coming with computers attached, and that seemed weird, too. Again, why not wait til you’re home? And then you had one. And then everyone had one.
When did cell phones come into wide use? Around 2000 I guess? Now 93% of the people in the United States have a cell phone, 77% have a smartphone. Basically everybody in the United States has a cell phone who wants one, and almost everyone has a smart phone.
93% of the United States can call anywhere in the world, anytime they want, pretty much wherever they are. And 77% have access to more data, in their pocket, at the touch of a couple buttons, than anyone in the world 20 years ago. 77% of the population of the US has hardware in their pocket that does things science fiction writers wouldn’t even have considered 30 years ago. I have a computer with games for my fucking cat, portable, on my person, everywhere I go.
87% of the 113 million American homes have air conditioning. Again, almost everyone has an air conditioner in the United States, if they want one. Look at the history of air conditioning in the US, and the world, if you want to see how remarkable that is. Think about how many people are alive right now because of it. And in most of the US, right now, when you want a ride, you hit a couple buttons on your phone and a car is at your house in three minutes, so cheap working class folks can take these rides to work.
The US is exceptionally productive and we’ve been made quite wealthy because of it. The United States produces 23% of the global GDP and holds 33% of the world’s wealth. Read that again. 33%. The United States comprises 4.2% of the world’s total population.
We are the wealthiest, most economically powerful nation in the history of the world, living in a time when technology has given us magic most of us never dreamed of five years earlier, and we are so wealthy almost all of us can access these innovations, every day, constantly, mundanely. Medicine routinely cures us of conditions that would have killed us a decade ago without spending the night in the hospital. Soon AI will drive our cars. A working man now lives better than most any king lived a hundred years ago.
And for the last few weeks we have been watching our government, the most powerful institution in human history, spend millions of dollars to tear infants from the arms of men and women in such terrible extremis they’ve left their homes and fled blindly into a new land, people so desperate they are willing to leave everything behind just for the chance at a decent life for their children and themselves. Or in a lot of cases, any life at all.
We, the people of the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, are so scared of allowing some of that bounty with which we’ve been blessed to be enjoyed by someone new, different, brown, that we are willing to terrorize thousands of children stop it.
There are men and women who need our help, who are fleeing, with their children, to try to make better lives for themselves, and we, lords of the earth, inheritors of this historic abundance, have responded not just by telling them to fuck off, but by persecuting them in a way so fundamental it’s hard not to become physically nauseous viewing the images, or hearing the sounds.
When did we become this people? When did we become such cowards, such abject villains? When did we become so terribly, deeply, scared?
Are we this small, this petty, jealous of our incredible fortune? What sort of ethic would allow this? I try to wrap my mind around that, but I don’t understand. What moral landscape must you inhabit to enjoy such vast, monumental wealth and treat people at their most vulnerable, applying for your aid and mercy, by stealing from them the most valuable thing in their lives? The most important relationship they will ever know. What man calling themselves Christian could permit this? Who calling themselves good? What sort of crippled, twisted soul allows this in their name, what coward demands this from their leader? The nastiness, the sadism, the evil. the pettiness. The pure, small, vile, grotesque pettiness.
If we were starving, I guess I may understand. But we aren’t. If we were jobless, I guess. But we aren’t. If we were in need, I guess. But we just aren’t. Don’t tell me we are, just don’t. We are not. We are the kings of the world, the most spoiled, materially endowed race of people that ever lived. We are wealthy and indulged past our grandparent’s wildest imagination, and we’ve chosen to expend that wealth by purposefully tormenting our neighbors, in need, and begging us for help, in the most unimaginably inhumane way possible.
We are the most affluent nation on the face of the earth, and if this is who we are, every coin, every ingot, is nothing but a marker to count our shame. Not a point of pride, but a benchmark of our cruelty. Until we open our arms to those around us, those in need, wherever they come from, That’s all our wealth will amount to - an accounting of national disgrace.
We stole this land from its original peoples, sometimes we killed them to do it. We enslaved a race of men and women to work that land, but that’s the past. History is an abattoir. Men kill, nations enslave. Whatever specific crimes our grandparents committed before us, they were the crimes of men, and men of every nation committed those crimes countless times before Americans were guilty of them. What made us new, what made us great, was that we were founded, at least in part, on principles, not race, not land, not blood. On ideas. You know those principles. We all know them.
That men are born with rights. Born with them. They don’t gain them by crossing borders and we don’t embody them by virtue of our skin or place of birth. No court or cop or border agent can gift them. They are ours, all of us, every human being, American or not. Either side of the Rio Grande or the ocean, you came with those rights when you were born.
Long before Jefferson, the slave owner, met Sally Hemmings, he gave us the words that acknowledged that truth, even though he couldn’t live it. Americans have tried ever since to live them, succeeding and failing in turn.
Now it’s our turn to try.
It’s time to open the borders. That’s all. Just open the fucking borders.
If you are in danger, come here, and you’ll be safe. If you are in need, come here, we’ve got plenty. If you want work, we’ve got a job for you. If you want something for yourself or your family, you will find it here. Come. This wealth, this abundance, is yours to take advantage of. Just come here and work for it. You’re a human being, this is your earth. Walk across it. Come here. Join us.
If you’re hungry, we’ll give you some food. If you’re thirsty, we’ll give you something to drink. If you’re a stranger, we’re going to invite you in. Just get here. We’ve got a job for you.
Don’t tell me we don’t have enough. We do. I can read, I can count, and I have eyes. I live here. We have enough. And if we did this, if we opened our doors, we’d have more.
Right now, if borders were opened around the world economists say the world would be 78 trillion dollars richer. The world GDP would double. That’s likely a conservative estimate. Think about that. Imagine the lives saved, enriched, lived more abundantly.
Let us be the first. Let us, finally, live up to our principles, our words, our founding. Americans are no race, no ethnicity. Let us be the ones to end this useless, antique leftover from our bloody, terrified past.
Abolish ICE, open the borders. Finally, just open them. There will never be a humane, decent, just way to guard the lines that separate us from our neighbors just a few miles down the road. There simply can’t be. Man has moved, migrated, intermixed, since before he was man. You cannot stop people from moving. You cannot stop people. You can only make them suffer. And that’s all that ICE will ever do, all the border will do. Restrict us, obstruct us. Choke us. Kill us.
As long as there is a border, there has to be an ICE to enforce it. As long as there is a wall, there will be a Trump to exploit it. As long as we are artificially separated by race, by color, by origin, there will be a Hitler waiting to build his camps.
And there will always be a mother, crying for her child, and a child, in a cage, crying for their mother.
Whatever crimes we’ve committed as a nation, whatever horrors we’ve visited on the weak and subject, let this be an expiation. Let us lead the way. Let us show the world, the way we did when we first thought to try and live as equals and not tribes surrounded by enemies, or serfs currying scraps from our betters. Let’s make America great again, the way it was at our founding, when the world watched in awe as the newest ideas of a newly enlightened mankind were suddenly signed into law and made manifest on the maps of the world.
Let’s wash our hands of the fear and the filth of our origins and stand up, finally, as brothers and sisters among brothers and sisters, not dogs fighting over scraps. As men among our fellow men. All our fellow men.
In the United States. Here. Now.
Abolish ICE.
Stop the wall.
Open the border.