“When a man’s an empty kettle,
He should be on his mettle–
And yet I’m torn apart.
Just because I’m presumin’
That I could be a human
If I only had a heart…”
Yip Harburg, from The Wizard of Oz
It is the unique attribute of human beings that we are born with human hearts. I don’t mean the the fist sized blood pump in our chest cavity, which is not essentially different than that of many other mammals; I am speaking of the figurative center of conscience, wisdom, and love… the thing that makes us human. Just as heart disease is common in the physical realm, these spiritual hearts are often found to be corrupted, often beyond resuscitation. The absence of a functioning human heart where one expects to find one, often leads people to seek elsewhere for the succor they had hoped to find in their fellow human beings. Unsurprisingly, they may gravitate toward the simpler hearts of pets, where expectations are lower and disillusionments rare. They join churches and clubs, or throw themselves into careers or hobbies trying to replace that which can only be found in one place. They imagine where man has failed, governmental structures, agencies and bureaucracies can succeed.
The humanitarian crisis on the border is a prime example of what happens when we leave a complex human catastrophe in the hands of those more interested in elections than humanity. To a great extent the crisis is one of our own making. Our borders are porous, and have been for a long time. The recent influx of children from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala is due in part to the signals the President has given, possibly intentionally, that these children would have a free pass into our country; signals that opportunists are using to make large sums of money. These countries are overrun with gang violence, murder, and hopelessness; for teens and the parents of young children the United States has suddenly become even more of a beacon of hope, worth risking everything to get to. How these nations became such perilous places to raise children is more of a dirty little secret. Our appetite for drugs coupled with weak border control contributed to illegal immigration for the purpose of crime. Young men joined L.A. gangs and became proficient in the drug trade and all the violence and criminal behaviors associated with that. They were eventually apprehended and deported, and found themselves back home where the inadequate police forces were unable to deal with their American taught criminality. These young men are now the proverbial big fish in a small pond, and their victims are now our chickens who have come home to roost.
Governments don’t have hearts. The best you can hope for is that some of the elected officials and employees still do, but often they’ve either lost theirs along the way, or are hamstrung by the structures they need to work in, at heart though, governments have no hearts. They are constructs, mechanisms, machines that we build to perform a function. Like our automobiles, they are designed to do what they do. Our cars will get us quickly from point A to point B (as long as point B isn’t downtown at rush hour), but if you expect your car to provide marriage counseling or spiritual guidance you will certainly be disappointed. We are now making robots that look and act surprisingly like human beings, but their humanity is an illusion. They remain machines, and their behavior is far from human. No matter how sophisticated the programming, it remains programming. They have data, but not wisdom; they make decisions but have no conscience; they mimic sympathy, but have no love. Likewise our governments, though comprised of humans are not themselves human. They cannot by their nature behave in ways they have not been programmed to behave; like the anthropomorphic robots, the illusion of humanity is the result of human input, but like writing code for a computer, that input is slow, limited and cumbersome; you can’t program a human heart.
Everything need not be human to be of value. I am glad my hammer is not human. I would not want my computer to be more human, this blog might never get written! I am perfectly content with a government that is not human, so long as it doesn’t try to pretend that it is. Government is supposed to be heartless. Not to say that the government should be cruel, but it should act more like a head and less like a heart. Like a great nervous system it should keep the country running smoothly; it should enforce the laws as they are written equally for all without prejudice. If the mechanisms of government are left to the whims of the heart, we will become a dry leaf blown by every subtle breeze; here, now there; into the water, into the fire. No… government should be our great machine, and if “we the people” become dissatisfied in our hearts with the programming, we will change it. The single great dread of every dystopian vision is that the machine will become self aware and make its own changes without the benefit of a human heart.
IMHO: We are indeed our brother’s keeper. That is not a duty that can be delegated. Charity requires humanity or it becomes simply a massive mechanism of redistribution, replete with inequity, fraud, and codependence. Governments can throw money at problems, but that is a poor substitute for humanity. Trading love and wisdom for security and provision we risk turning our government into a heartless sugar daddy, and our citizens into whores or gold diggers.
While a government can create a “humanitarian crisis”, it takes human beings to fix one. As always, it will be charitable actions by ordinary citizens that will help to clean up the mess left by governments and villains at our southern border. Do not expect the government to take care of this, we are the adults here… we are the humans. Yes, hold the governments feet to the fire to change the policies that have brought us to this place; but these victims are people… these are children, this is something that will require human beings to solve. We may not be able to help all the victims, often we cannot, but we need to put human faces on the crisis, and use our human hearts; regardless of the politics, we need to do the right thing. We can’t expect the government to suddenly become human anymore than we ever should have expected we could delegate that responsibility to it in the first place. Regardless of what governments pretend to do, regardless of the simulation, we need to take the responsibility of charity and humanity back. Whether through laziness, greed or more nefarious motivations, delegating the “war on poverty” to governments both nationally and globally has proven unsuccessful. If government plays any role at all, it will not be as a knight in shining armor, full of chivalry and honor, but just a trusty tin woodsman who hasn’t got a heart.
