In the introduction to Getting Over Ourselves, I wrote, “We cannot dehumanize other people without first sacrificing our own humanity. The impulse there, as we have seen, is so often—and always with utterly disastrous results—to try to get rid of the feared and hated people.” Of course, genocide is a thieves’ paradise, but what invariably drives it is one of humanity’s weirder fantasies—the fantasy that we can only be totally safe and happy in a pure land that is only for “us,” whoever “we” have decided “we” are. If someone sneezes in the wrong direction, we are assured that “they” are out to get us all, and then the paranoid fear aroused by wishing to annihilate other people can pile onto all preexisting hate and fear, until the feared and hated people are perceived as an existential threat to “our” very existence.

Jewish people in Germany were never an existential threat to the people of Germany who weren’t Jewish. Jewish people in Germany were an existential threat to the fantasy of a Germany for purely “German” people—people who had no ancestry that differed from the majority’s. For being an existential threat to a fantasy, Jewish people—along with everyone else who didn’t fit the very arbitrary definition of who was an acceptable “German”—were mercilessly killed if they couldn’t get out in time.

Palestinian people were never an existential threat to Jewish people. They are an existential threat to the fantasy of a Palestine renamed Israel and for Jewish people only, which must be the only place where Jewish people can be safe and happy, when in fact, as I’ve said before, it is one of humanity’s most important jobs to make it so that the name of the place where Jewish people can be safe and happy—where everyone can be safe and happy—is Everyplace. For being an existential threat to a fantasy, Palestinian people have been, and are being, mercilessly killed and expelled from their land and their homes—bombed, dispossessed, starved, shot, indefinitely imprisoned, tortured, and told the terror will not stop until they are all gone.

The fantasy of a land that is only for “us,” completely free of “them,” is not a monopoly of a few places and arbitrarily defined groups of people. Hindu nationalists want to be rid of people who aren’t Hindu. The Dominican Republic is trying to get rid of people of Haitian descent. And on and on it goes.

Right now, in the U.S.A., a movement fueled by the fantasy of a country that is only for White people—and specifically White “Christian” nationalist people—is trying hard to make that fantasy a reality. People who aren’t White—immigrant or otherwise—have never been an existential threat to White people in the U.S.A. People who aren’t White are an existential threat to a fantasy, and the real existential threat is and always has been to the people who aren’t White. Transphobia, homophobia, disability phobias, and any number of other manufactured phobias are also being dragged in here—the targets for obliteration just keep on proliferating.

When Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, one of the greatest multi-instrumentalists who ever lived, and who played a mean country fiddle, was challenged about why he was playing “that White music,” he said, “Because first of all, variety is the spice of life.” So the wise course of action would surely be to stop and think about how boring a nation of only “us” would be. Better yet, can we please just plain stop? Can we not deal directly with our inner demons instead of projecting them onto other people, and then trying to get rid of the people? Can’t we just get rid of our phobias? Of course we can, and so much more cheaply and easily.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg wrote recently, “The Talmud (Brachot 10a) teaches that there were some local goons who caused a lot of anguish for Rabbi Meir—so he began to pray for them to die. But his kickass wife, the brilliant Bruria, corrected him. Pray for an end to sins, not an end to sinners! He did, and they repented of their ways.” So we may note that even the most devout among us may feel that our lives would be so much better if certain people would just leave the planet—such is the power of the worst of us to bring out the worst in the rest of us.

Whether or not the local and transnational goons who are causing the rest of us a lot of anguish repent of their ways, that prayer is a great one, because while we’re at it we can pray for an end to our own sins. Hazrat Inayat Khan said, “Overlook the greatest fault of another, but do not partake of it in the smallest degree.” While we pray for an end to sins and work to mitigate the harms done by the goons du jour, we may also take advantage of the magnifying mirror they hold up to humanity’s worst character defects, so we can see them clearly and cease to partake of them.

And while we’re at it, we can try praying another prayer: that all of us—absolutely all of us—be held at all times and forever in eternal Love.

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