What Are We Becoming?

 Dehumanize:

to deprive (someone or something) of human qualities, personality, or dignity: such as:

to subject to inhuman or degrading conditions or treatment

to address or portray in a way that obscures or demeans that person's humanity or individuality

to remove or reduce human involvement or interaction in (something, such as a process or place)

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Do you see it?

This is what our culture has done. I see it nearly everyday on social media. Choose someone you strongly disagree with and then begin to strip them of human qualities. Name-calling. Mocking. Retribution. War.

I see it in how we view the working poor. How we speak about those experiencing homelessness. How we talk about "those neighborhoods."

I see it in our justice system. The ways we speak about and treat people that have been incarcerated. The ways we DON'T speak of them, essentially forgetting they exist and have human needs. The judgements we presuppose of anyone with a criminal record.

I see it in our policing. There are many, many good men and women in our policing system. I know some of them personally. But far too often, they are trained and/or enculturated to cease thinking of some people as fully human. Beginning generations ago, when forces were formed to capture and return people escaping enslavement and carrying forward, through many generations of determining who is worthy of our compassion and humanity -- and who is not.

 I see it in the ways we excuse, dismiss and justify individual examples, even when they are glaringly obvious - this is also a participation in dehumanization.

• How many individual incidents must we be forced to read about, watch play out on body cams and cell phones, participate in on social media (less deadly at first, perhaps, but the end goal of hatred and dehumanization is no different) before we are brought to our knees? 
• How much do we soak ourselves in it, silently accepting, before we become what we are viewing? 
• How many stories must we read before we advocate for and demand new ways of living with one another and new ways of applying justice? 
• How many times must we punish and scream out for vengeance and retribution before we face that it simply isn't working? 
• How many innocent people, simply living their everyday lives, will we read have been gunned down before we're willing to sit down at tables with people we disagree with and work. it. out? 
• How much can we witness and participate in dehumanizing speech and behavior before we lose our own humanity?
• How many innocent people must we execute?
• How many people must we watch be tried, judged and executed without ever reaching a jail cell?
• How many must die in a jail cell without ever going to trial?
• How many must freeze to death on the street?
• How many of our friends will we silently sit by and watch gleefully mock and ridicule those they disagree with?

How long will it take us to realize that when we strip the humanity - the Imago Dei - from another human being -- from ANY human being, we are stripping ourselves of our own humanity. We become the monsters.

How many and how long?