by David Mills
PITTSBURGH — I’d crossed the street, looking for a chalk drawing. “It’s a creative piece of sidewalk art,” a man on the opposite sidewalk had called to me. I found instead an apparently human feces with a little white flag in it saying “TrumpDump.” About five feet farther on was a flattened feces, the bootprint clear, with a little white flag saying “Dr. Oz.”
The message: Donald Trump is a piece of [word I can’t use here]: a useless, foul, toxic, disease-spreading substance that remains when everything good and useful has been removed. Someone normal people will despise and flush away from human society as fast as they can.
He is not that. Nor is Oz. Nor are his followers.
No one is completely toxic and foul and fit only for disposal. Every human being is human, however bad at being human he may be. That is a truth way too many people, right-wing and left-wing haters both, deny. That only makes the world more hateful. Dehumanizing your political enemies does nothing to stop them from doing what you don’t want them to do.
Everyone can see how wrong it is to reject the humanity of others. Just look at the people other people dehumanize, whose humanity you see.
Like the “criminals” Oz’s commercials demean to try to scare you into voting against John Fetterman. Or people on death row, who may look too monstrous to live, until you learn something about their lives. The great number, for example, who were victims of horrific childhood abuse, or mental struggles, or lives that pushed them into violent crime the way a child can be pushed down a slide.
You see they are human. They are deserving of pity, sympathy and care. More, they are us in crucial ways. As the saying goes, there but for the grace of God (or luck) go you. They must not be flushed away from human society. If that’s true for people whose humanity you see when others don’t, it’s also true of those whose humanity you don’t see but others do.
As one of our most important writers and cultural observers said: “I’m convinced that I’m a child of God. That’s wonderful, exhilarating, liberating, full of promise. But the burden which goes along with that is, I’m convinced that everybody is a child of God. The brutes and bigots. The batterers and the bastards are also children of God.”
Not a comfortable conviction. She continued: “And that’s where the onerous burden comes in for me, as a practicing Christian, to try to keep that in mind and not grit my teeth until they break off into little stubs.”
That was Maya Angelou, author of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” among many other deeply humane and humanistic works. She suffered much more from human wickedness than I have, or have many of you. Yet she set herself to remember, as hard as it must have been to do, that even the stupid snarling hateful little racist, the kind of person called the dregs of society, or a piece of [substance], was as much a child of God as she was. As human as she was.
Observant Christians and Jews have divine reason to believe in every human being’s humanity. Their founding stories of creation — God making man in his image and declaring the first people good — tell them this. Other religions say something roughly the same. But even a general belief in humanism requires belief in everyone else’s fundamental humanity.
I’m not (previous experience has shown me I have to say) an admirer of Trump’s. Judged by normal human standards, he’s an awful human being. But he isn’t what the sidewalk art said he is. Nor is Oz. Nor are his followers.
The disturbing truth is that you and I look more like Donald Trump than anyone wants to believe: too concerned for ourselves and what we can get, too restricted in the people we care for, too likely to treat others as instruments and objects, and too careless with the truth. A kind of cultural neon sign, he makes the universal human failings disturbingly obvious. And one of the failings it makes obvious is speaking of people as if they weren’t human.
The best, the most useful, response to Trump is to work at being less like him. Caring more for others and less for yourself, expanding the number of people to whom you give your special friendship, trying harder to see others as fellow human beings and not things, and telling the truth when lying will better get you what you want and telling the truth will cost you. And refuse to dehumanize others.
Fight him with every political tool available. But don’t treat him like a feces on the sidewalk. We have too little belief in humanity as it is.
