Poor Petition

 Vice President J.D. Vance is very very sure that the—now 21, as of yesterday—people his administration has extrajudicially executed without charge or trial on the high seas in recent weeks are all "terrorists" and "criminals" who really really deserve it...

—except when he admits he isn't; and they might not be. I missed it at the time—but apparently, in the middle of last month, Vance "joked" before an audience of hundreds that the people the administration is murdering arbitrarily in the Caribbean might just be local fishermen. 

"I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that part of the world," Vance reportedly said. Har har har. 

It never ceases to amaze me how much violence and horror and contempt this administration heaps on people just for being poor; just for wanting to live; just for seeking work; just for trying to survive. 

Fishermen trying to eke out a hard living? Let them tremble under the arbitrary threat of random death and annihilation from the skies—just because the U.S. government can get away with it. 

Asylum-seekers asking for work? Let them be banished to torture prisons in El Salvador, or disappeared to South Sudan or Eswatini. 

Time and again—all people did to merit this fate, apparently, was to ask for the chance to survive. They weren't even asking for public benefits in the U.S.—to which noncitizens are mostly not entitled. All they asked for was the chance to work and pay taxes in this country—supporting the welfare state for the rest of us while they qualify for none of its privileges. 

In short, they were not asking for a handout, but for the chance to earn a living. Or, just the chance to work unmolested on the seas and take home a catch of fish for the evening's dinner. 

All they did was to "beg [...] a brother of the earth / To give him leave to toil;"—as Robert Burns once wrote—

And see his lordly fellow-worm 

The poor petition spurn, 

Unmindful, tho' a weeping wife 

And helpless offspring mourn. 

I can't explain the unreasoning madness and cruelty of it. The utter depravity. All I can do is repeat Burns's timeless question: 

why has man the will and pow'r 

To make his fellow mourn?