Every country has its reflexes. France has existential crises. Britain has irony. The U.S. has moral amnesia. We rediscover that fear makes us cruel, then write an elegant apology once the damage is done.
This isn’t just politics; it’s neurology. Fear lights up the brain, silences reason and floods the body with righteous certainty. In small tribes, that reflex helped us survive. Scaled up to a continent-sized democracy with a 24-hour news cycle, it becomes civilization’s worst habit: pattern repetition without ownership.
A major episode came in 1882, when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act — the original “you’re the problem” memo. The same Chinese workers who built America’s railroads were suddenly accused of destroying it. The law banned their entry, denied citizenship and created a bureaucracy to police their existence.
A century later, we can’t function without China. Our economy is interlinked with the nation, and we buy our cellphones and laptops from the descendants of those we once called unfit for citizenship. We didn’t end exclusion; we outsourced it.
Next came the Jewish quotas of the 1920s. Eugenicists warned of “degeneration.” Congress codified its prejudice, and the U.S. closed its doors to refugees fleeing Europe. When the ship St. Louis arrived in 1939 with more than 900 Jewish passengers seeking safety, America turned it away. Over 250 later died in Nazi concentration camp.
Today we post Hanukkah greetings on corporate social media and pretend antisemitism is a relic.
Then came the Mexican paradox. During World War II, the U.S. created the Bracero Program to bring Mexican laborers to harvest crops. When the war ended, those same workers were labeled “illegals.” In 1954, Operation Wetback — yes, that was the official name — deported hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, some left in the desert without food or water.
We still rely on their labor while demanding walls to keep them out. The border is less a line than a stage where we perform our anxieties.
After 9/11, the spotlight shifted again. Foreign nationals who were Muslim were fingerprinted, tracked and interrogated under the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. Airline passengers named Mohammad or other Arabic names, women in hijab and many Brown non-Muslims mistaken as Muslims were pulled aside so often, the word random lost its meaning. The government later admitted the program achieved nothing. Fear was the point.
Now we buy oil and trade intelligence with the same nations we once painted as threats, while Muslim Americans are elected as leaders and still get profiled in airports and “othered.” The choreography never changes — only those forced to undergo the humiliating dance.
And when there’s no foreign villain handy, we exile our own. Black Americans, many descendants of slaves, have never escaped being scapegoated, and efforts to erase the evils committed against them continue today.
In the 1980s, as AIDS spread, gay men became the scapegoat. Hospitals refused patients, politicians joked on live TV, and whole communities were erased. Years later, we built memorials as if grief could double as absolution.
Disabled people were hidden in institutions, written off as “defective.” The Americans with Disabilities Act arrived in 1990, but half our public spaces still whisper, “You’re not welcome here.”
Poor Americans are renamed every generation: “vagrants,” “welfare queens,” “the undeserving poor.” We criminalize hunger, then host food drives to feel benevolent. Even veterans — lionized in war, abandoned in peace — sleep under bridges their own labor once funded.
If you diagrammed it, the pattern would look like this:
- Need someone.
- Fear them.
- Punish them.
- Apologize once it’s safe.
- Repeat.
It’s anthropology dressed as policy. The tribe bonds through exclusion; the nervous system rewards conformity. We get a little serotonin bump from drawing the circle tighter. Then, once the crisis passes, the brain sobers up and we write the retrospective conscience piece.
The “Republic of Second Thoughts” isn’t a place; it’s our collective brain working on a loop. We oscillate between impulse and insight, conviction and contrition. Every apology becomes the seed of the next offense.
And yet, awareness is the crack in the pattern. It means the brain has noticed the loop and refused to reenact it blindly.
If we could turn recognition into interruption instead of nostalgia, we might finally change the script. If we stopped waiting for safety before choosing empathy. If we caught ourselves mid-sentence, before the next apology tour or museum exhibit.
Maybe instead of being the “Republic of Second Thoughts,” we could become the “Republic of Forethought” — the country we keep promising to be, every time we remember what being human actually means.
Rhiannon Yandell is a writer and community wellness educator. She lives in Rockford.