Mark Weihman: H is for hawk, humanity and Haiti (guest opinion)

The audible words landed with a physical force, with weight, as I drove home from work. The vile words seemed to take on physical form, smacking me in the face. They were evil and seemed alive.

The words were demeaning, diminishing and racist: “We don’t want you. Get out. Go home. Go back to f—ing Haiti.” They were spoken by Megyn Kelly on her recent YouTube podcast, one that boasts over 4 million subscribers.

I recoiled as she continued “Our country’s better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic, our culture and our values. You being here only dilutes it for us.” A dark cloud of sadness enveloped me, I wept.

Later, No. 3 ranking Republican, Congressman Tom Emmer would echo Ms. Kelly speaking at a Faith and Freedom Coalition event “if you come to this great country, you have to understand that you’re coming here to be an American. … if they don’t assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came.”

They were both celebrating the recent Supreme Court decision on Temporary Protected Status. TPS was passed with bipartisan support by Congress in 1990 to allow nationals of other countries to gain status to legally work and live in U.S. due to humanitarian crisis, often fleeing violence, natural disasters or extreme conditions in their home countries. Current Haitian TPS holders include people here for decades and include students, caregivers, engineers and doctors. CNN estimates 190,000 Haitian TPS holders contribute almost $6 billion to the U.S. economy in industries such as construction, caregiving and hospitality.

Note bene: 350,000 Haitians and 4,000 Syrians may be affected by the ruling, and legal protections for over 1 million more from 17 countries are at risk.

UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham argued for Syrian TPS holders before the Supreme Court and called it the “ largest de-documentization event of people in U.S. history.”

Confronted with racism spoken out loud the feeling is jarring — words flung into existence to inflict pain and harm others. Our Haitian neighbors are human beings with names, lives, families and jobs. They don’t deserve denigration by our leaders such as Mr. Trump who helped spread rumors about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, during the 2024 presidential campaign: “They are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats.”

My 20-year-old daughter and I lamented this state — how can an advanced, educated society sink into the gutter with primitive words, spewing hatred toward their fellow man? We then talked about words that leap from the pages, words that soar, inspiring our fellow men to feel, to follow, to action. We sat in awe recounting exquisite, eloquent words that move men to cry, to tremble. We spoke of words and musical notes and melodies that make people dance and sing. We spoke of stories, characters and worlds unknown to us.

We entered such a world recently as we sat in a nearly empty local movie theater a recent afternoon. We sat there mesmerized as hawk feathers entered the screen, subtle birdlike mannerisms evolving slowly. We wept as the beauty of the natural world unfolded before our eyes, the essence of a goshawk intimately revealed to us — “an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence,” through this film, a “gorgeous evocation of the natural world.” The camera drew us closer, it seemed to peer into the hawk’s soul reflecting stark, penetrating eyes, the regal presence of this majestic creature filling the screen.

The movie, “H is for Hawk,” is about a young woman’s personal journey through grief and her relationship with her raptor. It is based on Helen MacDonald’s “beautiful and nearly feral book,” a book “with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don’t notice their astonishing engineering.” This is language at its best, filled with beauty and love; “writing that can lay bare some of the intimacies of the wild world … (a) book so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. It draws blood, in ways that seem curative,” the New York Times said.

Imagine this world with language that heals and comforts. Imagine words that reflect our best. Let’s use these words together. Beauty over barbarity, love over hate. Those are our choices, your choices.

Mark J. Weihman is a Loveland resident, husband of an elementary school teacher, father of four and Presbyterian elder. He draws inspiration from Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss. His favorite authors include David French, George Will, Michael Lewis and Michael Crichton.