I am away on family business this week and that generally puts a crimp in my ability to come up with something at least half-way decent for this Saturday morning coffee read, and I generally try to stick to fannish politics if I’m going to write up anything political, but this morning will see an exception.
What Trump and his feckless cronies are doing to those kids at the border in the name of the United States is beyond unacceptable, unconscionable, it is both EVIL and DISGUSTING.
Anyone who considers themselves to be a true patriot, a believer in this nation’s ideals and the lofty goals it has previously propounded on the world stage – from Washington, through Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy – should be wrapping themselves, not in the flag, but in shame these days.
MSNBC recently called out the Trump administration for what it truly is – racist – one of the first major media outlets to blatantly do so, rather than trying to dance around that word. George Will (George Will!) just told everyone to vote Democratic in the midterms; numerous Republican Senators and Congress people are refusing to run for re-election, many of them citing this administration as their reason for doing so.
It seems that mocking the disabled, branding Mexicans as murderers and rapists, advocating sexual harassment and abuse, bringing the country to its closest brush with nucelar war in decades and a thousand other senseless, careless, moronic, self-serving and nigh-on-dictatorial statements and actions were not enough, but taking children away from their parents may be. As awful as it sounds, I hope it is.
I hope this is the moment that makes most of the rest of us wake up, smell that it’s not just the coffee that’s burning, it’s the kitchen that’s on fire.
Broken record, but: this is how a nation’s descent into nightmare begins; the evil slowly eats away at one institution after another, making everyone so concerned about their own safety (or suborning them with promises of power and influence) that opposition fragments into small, disconnected, ineffective pieces. You’ve heard it before: first they came for the X but I did nothing because I’m not X. It’s almost a cliche because it is so true.
Well, everyone was a child, everyone knows children, many have or have had them. It’s a common theme we can all relate to. Which is what we all need to do. Let your humanity come through for half a second and imagine what it would have been like to have been taken away from your parents in the middle of the night by strangers, strangers who don’t even speak your language.
It’s wrong. It’s horrific. It’s EVIL and it is time that it is stopped.
ETA:
When I was 5 and a-half my family moved from one town in New Jersey to another. I was attending summer day camp at the time and, on the day of the actual move, I was instructed to get on a different bus at the end of the day at camp.
This different bus would take me to the new neighborhood and the driver had been instructed to drop me off in front of my new home.
I was terrified. I was afraid that I had remembered the bus number incorrectly, that the driver would drop me off in front of the wrong house, even that there wasn’t any “new house” and that this was a ploy to get rid of me, off to any number of horrible fates that only a five year old can dream up.
Compared to what is going on along our southern border right now, that experience hardly qualifies, but it does give me some personal insight and a tremendous amount of empathy for those kids caught up in this situation.
