This country could only end up in this set of circumstances through the lazy neglect of imagination.  The working phrase is: “Imagine how you would feel if . . . . . .?”.   The alternative to imagination, particularly in deciding how to treat fellow human beings, is to use a promoted stereotype off the shelf.   Stereotyping is cheap and easy and takes hardly any work.  The passive phrase for the stereotyped life style is:  “They are like XXX because that is how they are.”  The XXX is the spacer where you would say white, black, brown, male, female, immigrant, gay, queer, scientist, disabled  etc.  In the stereotyped world someone of dubious intent has provided one simple generic picture supporting each of those labels and one need not think or feel any further than the simple picture.  Normally only a few people are so lazy or indifferent that they pull the plug on that portion of human intelligence called imagination and coast along with the meme or stereotype.  But we now live in a governing regime that has made the stereotype a high value and has just massively funded a force of agents to operate off a base of stereotype

The most ignorant and dangerous person on the planet is an intelligent person who doesn’t know what he or she doesn’t know.  Because they are both intelligent and sufficiently deluded they can dispense with trying to genuinely imagine the conditions, challenges, and feelings of other people.  After all, they genuinely believe they know all they need to know.  Imagination is the way we incrementally expand our knowledge base beyond our direct experience.  Imagination becomes empathy when the dimension of feeling is paired to the process of witnessing.  We, none of us, can know another person’s experience exactly. This is especially true if they are significantly richer, poorer, older, of another racial or cultural  experience than our own, or have experienced direct personal, intense violence or violation.  But that said we can and must risk being  partially wrong by at least trying “to imagine how it would feel.”  Our system of justice is still, despite current practice, constructed over a system of mutual discovery; what is this person’s true story, and what is the law? 

A Modest Proposal for Good 

This writer can and must feel a version of the pain and the suffering of other people. It is only human to do so, just as it is injurious to every person’s humanity not to experience a form of mirror suffering of the other. My imagination of their pain is not the perfect replica of the pain of a grandparent of a family that has been ripped away.  My mirrored pain experience  is not the pain of the man or woman who climbs into the car each morning to go to work aware that a simple penalty for a fender bender accident could explode into the separation and destruction of their family because they are brown, or black or undocumented.  The shared pain though is real and imperfectly important because our imagination can try to begin to understand the shared basis of mutual humanity by making ourselves aware of  their storyline.  The dismissal of due process administration is politically strategic because due process exposes the individual’s true storyline; a story unavoidable if justice is to be served. This is why due process and justice have been set aside for this new form of deportation. The individual human’s story when told and understood makes it harder if not impossible to hide behind the drugged trance of stereotypical thinking. Our American legal system doesn’t believe “they” are all criminals, thugs, and ‘nasty characters’ breaking the law.  “They” are all innocent until proven guilty. Good is reading the papers, and listening to enough diversified news sources to sense the pain of the actual truth. Good is hearing the stories and decisively acting on your newly informed, if not pained, sense of good.