America: A Country That Eats Children

When my daughter was about four years old, she took it into her head to hide from me in a children’s clothing department at a Macy’s Department store.  For what only could have been about 2 minutes, I searched for her, called her name, enlisted the help of the saleswomen in the department.  The terror I felt was indescribable, fueled largely by the fact that this department was right near a triple set of glass doors leading out of the store and into the parking garage.  I was shaking with fear that my little girl had been taken, abducted.  My ordeal ended when a very tall man, who was walking through the department, saw us searching.  Being very tall, he was able to see down into the center of a circular clothing rack, and asked, “Is your little girl wearing a purple sweater, does she have long dark pigtails?” as he leaned in and scooped her out in one quick motion.

His action terrified my daughter, who had no idea that a stranger could so easily hold her in his grip.  Once he handed her over to me, all I could do was clutch my child to my chest and hurry from the story to the garage, securing my little girl into her car seat, and then sitting in the car, sobbing.  I have no idea how long I cried.  From the back seat, my little girl’s voice kept repeating, “I’m sorry mommy.  I’m sorry.”

She was only being a child.  She was following an impulse to be playful, with no idea of how dangerous the world in which we lived was.

I was reminded of this episode this past week as news of the depraved actions of our border authorities taking children away from families seeking asylum began to appear.  These are families who know full well how dangerous the world is, who make long, arduous, life-threatening journeys to a country, The United States, which they imagine and hope will offer them a safety that they have rarely known, a place to make a home, to raise their families and live in peace.

Instead, their children are ripped from them, and they are themselves held in prison-like facilities for extended periods of time.  The dream they had of a world of welcome and peace is shattered, and now they have no idea if they will ever see their children again.  The children themselves are being warehoused, living in trauma, and we are now told that these facilities are drugging the children with high doses of psychotropic drugs – forcibly – I assume to keep them from screaming and crying and expressing the trauma that they are experiencing.

I remembered – with a full visceral reliving – the terror and helplessness I felt in those brief moments when I thought my child was lost to me.  I know what these parents felt in those first few minutes of shock.  But my ordeal lasted only a few moments.  What if that tall man, instead of handing my child back to me, ran through those glass doors into the parking garage with her, and my child disappeared?  What if I was restrained by others who prevented me from even attempting to follow, to chase after her?  What if I were thrown into a detention facility myself with no one who could tell me what had happened to my child?

 (Photo of native children confined in an "Indian School" from Equal Justice Initiative)

For many of us, it is beyond comprehension that the United States of America could be guilty of such actions.  For others, however, it presents an opportunity to remind everyone that this is, in fact, a continuation of policy that gave us the Pratt Schools, where native children were torn from their families and forced into institutions where they were forced to assimilate to the “American” dictates.  Places where the “Indian” was beaten out of them, and where many children died of abuse, illness and despair.  Of course, the practices during times of slavery in the U.S. included separating families and children, selling children away from their parents, selling fathers away from their families.   What about child labor, where many children were living in squalor, working more than 12 hours a day – essentially being worked to death?  How about the Japanese internment camps?

It doesn’t take long to realize that what appears to be a shocking new turn toward evil in the USA is, in fact, just a refashioned, very old policy that shows no mercy, no compassion, no love for the “other” among us.   It is a deep depravity that is more truly American than any of the fairy tales repeated about our welcome of immigrants, or our love of democracy.

We have to face the reality of our own history fully, without turning away.  Those of us who are horrified by what we are seeing happening to these immigrant families must acknowledge both the current expression of our country’s inhumanity and our long, dark history of that same behavior.   We have to work to end the immediate evils.  But we can’t stop there.  We have to work to pull out the root and stem of this evil, if that is possible.  I don’t know if it is, since our country was born of genocide, built by slaves, grown by exploitation and cruelty, and has a large number of citizens who remain in willful in denial about what we owe to those we’ve harmed, or what we must do to right ourselves as a nation.  The challenges are great, and the goals may not be achievable.  But those "better angels of our nature" call out to us.  We have to try.  There are many of us willing to take action to oppose the continuation of these evils.  Look around you:  see which religious organizations are involved in appropriate activism, join organizations that focus on human rights and direct action.  Write to your representatives.  Make phone calls.  Attend demonstrations.  Do whatever you can with whatever talents and abilities you have, with whatever gifts you can share.  Without rebuilding this country entirely, none of our children are safe.  There is no justification for what our government is doing now, or the crimes against humanity it has committed in the past. But it is essential to understand that rebuilding this country is not possible until we tear this old country down.  The evils and practices of that old America have to die in order that a new country dedicated to the well-being of all life can be born.  Don’t turn away.  Don’t go back to sleep.  We need you. 

Artwork:

photo matzov.com