Harms spread across society, enveloping Americans in pain and anger. We can find a better way. 

Protestors march at the No Kings event on Oct. 18, 2025, crossing Sixth and Commercial streets in downtown Emporia. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

Many people watched the brutal, sometimes deadly, ICE apprehensions with glee.

Others posed with the so-called Alligator Alcatraz signage in Florida. Attacks on Black professionals have driven Black America, according to the Urban League, into a recession.

For many Gen Xers, the mood in the country has felt like President Ronald Reagan’s 1980s retrenchment in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. Politicians in the Confederate South have redrawn voting maps and eliminated majority-Black congressional districts.

This might feel different, but it isn’t. America understands intentional harm, but it does not seem to matter until that harm begins to spill onto caste-privileged groups. Suddenly, the wider culture finds compassion. Many of our friends and neighbors only seem able to care about harm until that harm reaches them.

As tariffs and spiking prices for diesel fuel have raised farmers’ costs, lowered crop prices and contributed to widespread farm closures, candy-apple-red Kansas has become competitive for blue politicians.

People understand harm and will stomach it as long as it happens to other people.

Repercussions of legislation and policies are clear, but they lose priority to powerful interests, to windfall profits or to base cruelty in the short run. Society is mean enough already, and this tendency is the reason.

A KSNT report last month, for example, said some 7,000 SNAP (Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program) recipients did not receive their benefits. People went hungry.

This development is the direct result of President Trump’s H.R. 1 — a cruel, sweeping package of legislation cutting support for programs such as SNAP. It marked a dark moment because this pain was predictable. Public health advocates warned of this. In detail.

This could mean more than hunger. Kansas Reflector last year referenced a 2016 Clemson University study by researcher Jonathan Randel Caughron that found that a 1% increase in food insecurity could lead to a 12% increase in violent crime.

Speaking of crime, consider the harmful impact of the overuse of cash bail in our courts.

Last year, retired Magistrate Judge Ron Sylvester shared an old story he wrote as journalist about a man with mental health challenges, his dog Smokey Bear and two $1 QuikTrip hot dogs Smokey Bear had snarfed down.

Sylvester said the court system spent $3,350 jailing and prosecuting the man over $2.11.

For people accused of nonviolent crimes, a simple text gets them back into court, Sylvester said. Judges can deny bail for those accused of violent crime or for those who are flight risks.

We have bail not because it is needed, but because bail bondsmen have a strong lobby.

These costs land hardest on people least able to pay. On any given day in Kansas, as many as 5,000 people sit in county jails not because they’re guilty but because they can’t afford bail. Our system treats you better if you have money.

This behavior has deep roots.

It became clear, for example, that tobacco corporations knew about the health risks associated with their products decades before admitting it.

America has continued to resegregate its schools despite the 1954 Brown decision that demonstrated how segregation harmed children. Kenneth and Mamie Clark showed Black dolls and white dolls to Black children, asking the boys and girls which dolls were good or bad, or pretty or ugly. Black children assigned negative traits to the Black dolls and identified with them.

Segregation hurt white children, too, though those arguments didn’t emerge in the case. The researchers found that discrimination fostered a sense of entitlement in white children and made them less empathetic.

Ponder this through the lens of Jane Elliott’s now famous “blue eyes, brown eyes,” classroom experiment. For those unfamiliar, Elliott set up a classroom activity in which children alternately enjoyed a suite of advantages and later, cold discrimination, for arbitrary physical traits.

The students gained a deeper understanding of racism’s impact, but the impact on the out groups proved most profound. Elliott said assignment scores dropped for students in the out-group. Just a few hours of mistreatment affected student performance. Then imagine, said the 92-year-old anti-racism activist, a lifetime of such treatment.

We know better but often simply choose not to do better.

Elliott remains one of the nation’s bright lights, as were the Clarks and others who asked the country to look deeper, dig deeper for ways to brighten society and to chase off darker impulses. Society has plenty.

It is left to a majority then, to find the bits of light in ourselves and to encourage it in our circles. We’ll have to drill deeper into public policy and challenge predictable harm instead of settling for the convenience of expedience.

We’ll have to be more insistent on this. As our friends at the Kansas Leadership Center say, we need to care more and risk more on behalf of ourselves and our communities. Both an ounce of prevention and a pound of cure.

What harm could there ever be in that?