One giant thing that separates us from the animals is the fact that we separated ourselves from the animals.  Or rather, we put ourselves above them.  Some of us call it "the image of God," and others of us call it "evolution," but somewhere in the unsearchable wastes of time, we started talking about what makes us us, and the fact that we were talking about it is what made us.

We know that other animals fall in love and talk and make war and have territories and build houses and have tribes and show off and use tools and sing songs and pass on traditions and fight over women.  We've been watching them too long to think otherwise – which is another great reason we separate ourselves.  Nobody knows whether a dog thinks about being a dog or about other animals in general; but we know that dogs know what dogs are and they know what people are and that no dogs have declared their independence from or superiority over people.  At least not in writing.

But we've declared our independence from dogs, and the reason we declared it is because we declare our allegiance.  To leave the animal kingdom was to join man's.  It was the idea, not entirely foreign to many of the animals, that in order for men to survive, we had to get along with men, and that getting along meant acting a certain way.  The act of joining this society was known as being "humane," and it fostered all our sociable instincts while denigrating our selfish ones.

Thus, we could have been polygamists like the silverbacks or free lovers like the Basset Hounds, but we decided (at one point) to be consensual and monogamous.  We could have been more odious than the skunk and more poisonous than the adder, but we hoarded all our garbage into garbage dumps and took money from one another to flush our feces down the sewer.  The tendency to kill over a tree was replaced with property rights.  You build a nest and, other things going smoothly, you continue to live in it.  All this allowed us to plan for the future, and our planning meant our investment, and our investment meant we grew comfortable.  The entrance into humanity is an exit from natural liberty.  We find our freedom in constriction – the shaping of our instincts along pre-defined and socially-accepted patterns.  When we know what to expect, we know how to act.  Every country is a differently shaped cage.  Every nation is a different twist on a straitjacket.

All of this is to prevent suffering and war.  War is what we call it when a man holds another at gunpoint for a wallet.  It's what happens when a woman is kidnapped and raped, or her children are shot at, or she gets chased down her neighborhood by gangsters.  It's when one people decides it can enslave another, or when one political party tries to terrorize another, or when a few rich men decide they can brutalize the poor men.  We've gotten so used to the idea of war as nations and armies and conquests that we forget, to our disgrace, that war happens every day in every society around the entire globe.  Our police forces are little soldiers, and our violent criminals are the Hun.  Society sometimes wars against other societies, but it is always at war primarily with itself.  Every country bans robbery, rape, kidnapping, and murder because it wars against robbers and rapists and kidnappers and murderers.  Every law is a pointed gun.  Every legislator is a kind of general.

Donald Trump declared these things this week when he called our criminal aliens animals.  The public, or at least the loudest part of it, was upset.  It was upset that anyone could be so inhumane as to call another man, and especially someone as "vulnerable" as a foreigner, an animal.  To them, it hearkened back to the days when Jackson said the only good Indian is a dead Indian, or when Hitler gassed many of the Jews, or when the Jews exterminated the Canaanites.  But in calling these robbers, murderers, rapists, and kidnappers animals, Trump was hearkening back to the beginning of the Enlightenment.  He was merely declaring the most fundamental of social principles -- that in order to be a man you have to be somewhat humane, that the brotherhood of man and a system of law are both things you can quit, and that there are consequences to quitting them.  The reason we don't let tigers run wild is because we're worried about what they'll do to the humans.  John Locke said a pirate was a loose tiger, and there are only three things you do with a tiger.  You put him in a cage, you put him back in the jungle, or you put him to sleep.

Those of us who can't handle the least brutal of these three options, deportation, aren't just avoiding the options.  They're opting for your wives and children to be menaced by known foreign predators like MS-13 and then, supposing said criminals are ever caught, for you to pay for their cages.  They believe that this option makes them humane.  What it proves is that we have more animals running free in the United States than our president has suggested.  First, there are the animals who threaten to maim us.  Second, there are the animals who deny the Kingdom of Man and refuse to call the worst of us animals.  It's my opinion that the second are more dangerous than the first.

The Washington Times states that many crimes committed by foreigners, and especially religious and ethnic minorities, are going unpunished to keep said criminals from deportation.  Washington State no longer allows us to identify people by Social Security numbers, which allows our most dangerous criminals to simply change their identities.  And our driver's licenses are no good to fly with because our identities, for the sake of illegals, aren't properly confirmed by the authorities.

Denver and other cities (and states such as California and Washington) have reduced many sentences to 364 days instead of a full year – which allows criminal aliens to avoid felony convictions and thus fly under the radar of the federal government.  Prosecutors and judges all over the nation are charging people with lesser crimes simply to protect them from consequences.  The ACLU is advising local authorities to keep information from federal authorities, which allows criminals to jump from one state to another.  When this fails, crimes are not being charged simply because a man happens to be from another country.

According to The New York Times, California requires immigration status to be factored into criminal convictions – meaning lighter sentences for all kinds of illegals.  A green card-holder from India gave a felony-worthy beating to his wife but was let off easy so he wouldn't get deported.  In Boston, a green card-holder from Guinea-Bissau was given a 364-day sentence after robbing two banks and being a suspect in a double-murder.  Another man was deported nine times before he returned to Edmonds, Washington, where he dragged a woman into an alley and raped her.

Our "morality" allows animals to commit atrocities.  The men who separate us from the animals are reported in the news to be monsters.  We've become so over-civilized that we can no longer carry on a civilization.

Jeremy Egerer is the author of the troublesome essays on Letters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter and Facebook.