Is Complacency Our Achilles Heel?

Over the years I've watched as any number of really important reports and studies are published then broadly reported across the mainstream news outlets only to disappear down the Memory Hole in just a few days. Gone, forgotten, ignored.

On their own many of these reports should have sparked some public reaction or some form of response from our political leadership but, no, nothing. Few seem to grasp that those reports are cumulative. One merely adds to those before it. Collectively, they should have sent us into the streets with pitchforks and torches but, no, nothing.

I've become convinced that our politicians don't respond to these alarming changes except in the most gestural way because that would interfere with their other plans.  You can't truly mobilize to fight climate change and build 60-year pipelines. Just because you say you can doesn't mean you're not having us on. It's what I like to call horse shit.

Why do they get away with feeding us horse shit? Because we let them.

Complacency, that's what it's about. Yesterday the Washington Post published an op-ed from US foreign service officer, Chuck Park, explaining his decision to resign his post.

Park said all the talk about a "Deep State" is nonsense.

They have it all wrong. Your federal bureaucracy under this president? Call it “The Complacent State” instead.

...In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, I spoke of American openness and friendship at consulate events as my country carried out mass deportations and failed thousands of “dreamers.” I attended celebrations of Black History Month at our embassy in Lisbon as black communities in the United States demanded justice for Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and the victims of the mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. And in Vancouver, I touted the strength of the United States’ democracy at the consulate’s 2016 election-night party as a man who campaigned on racism, misogyny and wild conspiracy theories became president-elect.

Since then, I have seen Trump assert the moral equivalence of violent white nationalists and those who oppose them, denigrate immigrants from “shithole countries” and separate children from their parents at the border, only to place them in squalid detention centers. 

But almost three years since his election, what I have not seen is organized resistance from within. To the contrary, two senior Foreign Service officers admonished me for risking my career when I signed an internal dissent cable against the ban on travelers from several majority-Muslim countries in January 2017. Among my colleagues at the State Department, I have met neither the unsung hero nor the cunning villain of Deep State lore. If the resistance does exist, it should be clear by this point that it has failed.

Instead, I am part of the Complacent State. 

The Complacent State sighs when the president blocks travel by Muslim immigrants; shakes its head when he defends Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman; averts its gaze from images of children in detention camps. Then it complies with orders. 

I’m ashamed of how long it took me to make this decision. My excuse might be disappointing, if familiar to many of my colleagues: I let career perks silence my conscience. I let free housing, the countdown to a pension and the prestige of representing a powerful nation overseas distract me from ideals that once seemed so clear to me. I can’t do that anymore. 

My son, born in El Paso on the American side of that same Rio Grande where the bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter were discovered, in the same city where 22 people were just killed by a gunman whose purported “manifesto” echoed the inflammatory language of our president, turned 7 this month. I can no longer justify to him, or to myself, my complicity in the actions of this administration. That’s why I choose to resign.

The complacency that led Park to resign isn't confined to the US State Department or to the United States for that matter. It hums along in the background in many places, including our country and Canadian society.

We're complacent. We put up with nonsense that we should openly and loudly rebuke. We don't act and those who lead us down this dead-end lane know we'll let them off the hook. Because they have no other choice, they'll consult us this October knowing most of us will vote for whatever guy we find somewhat less offensive than the other guy. That's why they don't add "none of the above" to the ballot.

Complacency is somewhat less than luke warm. It is embedded in our hearts and our minds and we need it for it is how we look away. And so long as it rules us, we'll never get out of this murderous rut.