The term “collateral damage” came into widespread use during the Vietnam War. It was meant to describe damage that was unintended or incidental. The absence of intent probably didn’t make the victims feel any better, but their pain wasn’t a major priority for our military leaders. They had bigger fish to fry, and this was clearly a case of eggs being broken to make some omelets.

We are entering a new age of collateral damage, and this time the victims are Americans. Many Virgin Islanders will be among those victims. To understand what is happening to our country, a brief review of the history of social progress is useful.

In modern history, there have been three “waves” of social progress. The first of these was the establishment of the fundamental “rights of man.” In our country, this advance was captured in the Declaration of Independence, especially the notion that “all men are created equal” and that they have the “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” As we know, the Declaration did not really mean all men. Most notoriously, slaves were considered only 3/5 of a person and treated as property. And there were other flaws as well. But it was a huge step forward.

The second wave was the establishment of basic economic rights. People should not die in the streets, and workers have certain rights. These were captured in New Deal legislation as a response to the Great Depression. Here again, there were glaring omissions. For example, to get Social Security passed, President Roosevelt agreed to leave out agricultural workers and domestics. Not by accident, these workers were almost always black and living in the Deep South.

Then we come to the third wave and our own times. This wave is still in progress and consists of the extension of the first two sets of basic rights to groups that have been historically excluded. This wave could be defined as the repeal of the white male monopoly. In our country, the groups that have benefited have included women, African Americans, handicapped people and, most recently, gay people. The big markers are laws such as the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Americans With Disabilities Act, among others.

The Virgin Islands benefited from this third wave because respecting the right of the nonwhite majority to govern itself became an imperative if we were to remain faithful to these newly adopted values. And even though it is often a confusing mess, Virgin Islanders have benefited in other ways as well from these recent advances.

But there is no free lunch. Social justice also produced losers, and each period of social advancement has invariably been followed by a wave of reaction. These reactionary movements have done great damage. In describing them, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said, “It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”

Our current reactionary era began with “white backlash” during the 1960s, and racial animosity has remained its key driver ever since. It gained force with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and, as a response to the election of President Obama, has reached the pinnacle of its power. It is now the most potent force in American life, crippling our government, entrenching powerful corporate and financial interests and, most immediately relevant, shredding America’s social safety net.

This is where collateral damage and the Virgin Islands come in. Two dramatic examples of the extremism and recklessness of the reactionary right in Congress are sequestration and the recent House vote on agriculture and Food Stamps.

What is becoming increasingly clear, although it should come as no surprise, is that the impact of these actions is falling most heavily on the most vulnerable people in America society. Sequestration imposed major federal budget reductions on a more-or-less across the board basis. When the predicted end of the world did not come to pass, many people said, “Maybe this isn’t so bad.” They would turn out to be wrong, as we are finding out now.

More dramatic than sequestration was the recent vote in the House of Representatives on Food Stamps. With this vote, which eliminated all Food Stamp (SNAP) funding because the Republican right could not get the severe cuts it wanted, we may have reached a new low.

There is a fuzzy line between politics and morality. Because they live in that murky gray area, politicians, except when they are posturing in public, tend to define everything as political. Their social isolation from the consequences of their actions also produces a kind of moral blindness and an inability to see when we have crossed that line. With this vote, among others, they – and we – have crossed it. Although they would deny it, there is widespread hunger in our country. They intend to make that situation worse. That is not politics. It is a form of evil.

Those who make decisions in our hyper-stratified society won’t notice the sequester or these budget cuts. Many of them no longer even bother to fly on our lousy airlines, and, if they do, they receive special treatment and don’t have to share the experiences of the “little people” and the losers. As a nation, our leaders no longer have the time of day for losers.

Much of the right’s animus and meanness is directed toward minorities, especially African-Americans. As a result, whites in need and many others become collateral damage, the unintended victims of formulaic cuts. These others include Indian reservations, especially those without casinos, and the territories.

The far-right members of the House probably never think of these reservations, the Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico when they seek these draconian cuts. But in the case of the Virgin Islands, it would almost certainly give them an extra measure of happiness to realize that they were making another group of low-income black people suffer.

The worst impacts appear to be on Indian reservations where there is near total dependence on federal funding. In some of these places, federal dollars are the economy, and the unemployment rate is 85 percent. On the Pine Ridge Reservation, per capita income is less than $8,000. Desperate poverty is about to become more desperate.

All collateral damage. There is a regular pattern in the comments section of various online papers, including The Source, of attacking anyone who criticizes the Tea Party. Most of these attacks are political. But we have crossed the political boundary into territory where this country has not been since it faced the moral quandary of racial segregation and confronted the forerunners of the Tea Party. Even President Obama has felt constrained to give these extreme views a respectful hearing. Those days should be over. We are in deep trouble as a society, possibly as deep as any time since the 1850s. The perpetrators should no longer be permitted to posture as overtaxed victims.

The Virgin Islands will pay a steep price for the nation’s moral failure. It will probably not be on the scale of the Pine Ridge reservation, but it is worth closing with the words of the leader of the Oglala Sioux tribe, “More people sick; fewer people educated; fewer people getting general assistance; more domestic violence; more alcoholism.” This is no longer about politics. We face a moral dilemma as old as the scriptures.