"Membership in a nation is supposed to be a guarantee of equality and human rights. But, as two recent books attest, the concept of citizenship has been unequal from the start, and is increasingly decoupled these days from anything that even looks like safety, freedom, or fairness."

Great read. The first sentence in this piece says enough: “Membership in a nation is supposed to be a guarantee of equality and human rights.” But what is membership anyway, besides a signifier of something that is not, in fact, human? It’s a different word, after all. Of course, being a human in a nation is supposed to guarantee human rights. Being a human /at all/ is what “grants” us dignity. Yet every aspect of how we talk about things and communicate is so far removed from recognizing life as a thing that deserves to be on it’s own, point blank. The inequality and decoupling has been happening and increasing “from the start.”