SALINAS, CA — Like many Americans, in recent weeks, I have wondered: “What’s going on in our country?”
One of the things that most concerns me these days is how human beings treat one another. It’s not good.
Around the world, individuals are attacked because of a basic human characteristic — race, gender, ethnicity, religion, immigration status etc.
Here in the United States, a recent spate of violence seems connected to events half a world away.
On Mar. 12, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a Lebanese-born U.S. citizen, allegedly rammed a truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Mich. in what the FBI said was a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.” No one else was killed in the attack, but a security guard was injured. CBS News reported that, according to one of Ghazali’s friends, a recent Israeli airstrike on a Lebanese village killed several of his family members.
Eleven days earlier, The Michigan incident followed another attack in Austin, Texas on Mar. 1 in which three people were shot and killed and more than a dozen were injured. The suspected gunman, Ndiaga Diagne, was a naturalized U.S. citizen who opened fire in a beer garden located in a busy part of downtown Austin. According to officials, Diagne wore a sweatshirt that said, “Property of Allah” with a shirt underneath with the Iranian flag.”
Different people will read these stories differently. I read them as cautionary tales. This is what happens when you insult, scapegoat, and dehumanize groups of people. Often, what happens next is that members of those groups are then attacked, beaten or even killed.
The migrant community that I’ve spent my career caring for and patching up knows this story all too well. It’s a tale that we should all work to make a relic of the past. Maximiliano Cuevas, MD is the CEO of Clinica de Salud del Valle de Salinas, a collective of non-profit community health care centers that serve patients in Monterey County