A story that has long haunted me is called to mind by recent events. In 1614, Thomas Hunt, an English explorer and trader, was ordered by his captain, John Smith of Jamestown fame, to continue fishing the Eastern seaboard while Smith explored and mapped the coast. Hunt contrived to kidnap seven Nauset Indians here on the Outer Cape with the objective of taking them to Malaga, Spain to sell them into slavery. Twenty Indians from Patuxet (present day Plymouth) had also been abducted and were on board Hunt’s ship.
Imagine the extreme sense of loss and the terror triggered by the randomness of being kidnapped and enslaved. One day you are living your everyday life. The next, inexplicably, you have been captured and put in bondage, physically and psychologically traumatized. Stripped of your identity, separated from family and community, reduced to a commodity, your one and only life has been deemed disposable. You are handled with an indifference every bit as ruthless as the physical cruelty you suffer.
Rights exist only within the framework of a sociopolitical community. Taken prisoner and now stateless, you can appeal to no law to contest your bondage. Your horror is the horror of the enslaved West African in the 17th century or the sexually trafficked woman in the 21st.
We all learn early in life that human cruelty, physical and psychological, can manifest itself in many forms. At one extreme, some acts of cruelty are performed with a cold indifference to the suffering inflicted; at the other, with a jubilant savagery. Perhaps you have seen the widely circulated photograph of alleged Venezuelan gang members — heads shaved, hands manacled, ankles chained together — being marched bent over in single file by armed men wearing black masks. Given the obscene pageantry captured in the image, you might have concluded that a combination of cold-heartedness and perverse pleasure was behind this precisely staged and recorded spectacle.
Some of these men, perhaps even the majority, might be the “bad hombres” that Trump labeled them. But law and due process are foundational to our government, and both have been subverted by Trump’s specious invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. Moreover, it turns out that the abduction of at least one man who had been granted protected legal status in 2019 was the result of a “clerical error.” This is not a surprise to anyone who is paying attention to the administration’s indifference to facts.
A larger truth about the deportations is obvious. These abductions were intentionally cruel acts perpetrated by cynical and smug people with a cavalier attitude toward individual rights. Laws are made to protect the innocent. Taking short cuts and using legal maneuvers to concoct an end run around or to ignore laws altogether are not the acts of people truly interested in law and order, although “law and order” are generally the first words they use to defend their actions.
Those of us who are free both to think and act have found ourselves facing a different form of bondage to a Congressional majority that chooses not to heed its Constitutional duties. The courts are struggling to curtail a law-flouting administration. Our civil service, designed to protect us from the winds of change, is being unlawfully decimated. As a result, we the people must acknowledge that we are citizens in a country at war with autocracy. As journalists hunt for the facts, lawyers argue in court, and watchdog groups keep tabs, what are you and I going to do about it?
The “Hands Off!” movement represents a strong beginning. The metaphorical image is muscular, its exclamatory injunction forceful. As we form the resistance — protesting peacefully and engaging in strategic nonviolent civil disobedience — let us all make the conscious choice not to live in what Gore Vidal termed “the United States of Amnesia.” Except for Tisquantum (also known as Squanto), who managed to escape to England and later to return to his homeland, the names of Hunt’s 26 other kidnapped captives have been lost to history.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Remember this man’s name.
Andrew Hay is a retired English teacher. He lives in Eastham.
