The first news article I read this morning began, "Children finished their first day of school with no parents to go home to tonight. Babies and toddlers remained at daycare with no guardian to pick them up. A child vainly searched a workplace parking lot for missing parents."
My stomach churned and my eyes filled with tears. I don't understand anyone who can read those words without a sense of horror. (Let alone watch video of the traumatized children, which is also circulating in the news today.)
I remember the three times that my own child was "missing" from my point of view--all three times were due to miscommunications, and all three times I found him within an hour and he was fine, not even upset, because from his perspective nothing had been wrong. I remember the first time, when he was a preschooler, how glad I was that he was not only physically okay, but also had experienced none of the fear and panic I had felt while trying to find him. He had not been lost and alone, searching for me and becoming more and more frightened as he failed to find me--he was at a park with an adult relative who had not let me know he was going with her. I was so glad that my child had been spared the terror I had felt as I imagined all the things that could have happened to make him disappear from our campsite.
The other two times, years later, he did not come home from school at the usual time, so I came home from work to an unexpectedly empty house, and had to track him down. Again, he was fine and calm, but now as I read the news stories, I imagine the reverse of those situations. I imagine him walking in the door after a day at middle school or high school, expecting me to come home from work in a couple of hours, and then becoming increasingly worried as the evening goes on with me neither arriving home nor telling him where I am. Would he know what to do? He would probably call the police at some point. That's only a possibility for him because of his citizenship status (and the lack of fear of police that is part of the privilege of his white skin). What would he do in that situation if he were an undocumented immigrant, or if I were? Who would he call? Who would take care of him, and help him find out what had happened to me?
I remember L., a seven-year-old girl I met when I was serving a congregation in Colorado. I accompanied her and her mother to an ICE appointment, with their translator. I walked into the building with them, through the metal detector, and both my white skin and my clerical collar afforded me a measure of privilege they did not have. L. was nearly silent for the drive from their home to the facility, except to say that her stomach hurt. Of course it did. She had memories of the people in this building taking her mother away for months, leaving her in the care of a kindly neighbor. I wondered at the time what would have happened to L. if there had been no such neighbor willing to take her in? (And what would I have done if on the day I was with them, ICE had again detained her mother?)
"Who will care for the children?" That is the question before us today for thousands of children separated from their families, including those whose parents were abducted by the government yesterday in Mississippi.
I use the word abducted intentionally. These people were taken, without notice or the ability to make plans for their children's safety and wellbeing, by agents of the United States government. (A few were able to make hurried phone calls begging others to take care of their children.)
I remember being a childcare worker, responsible for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers while their parents work. I have no idea what I would have done if one day, those parents failed to show up to pick up their beloved children. I suppose I would have started by calling them--and what then, when I would either be unable to reach them at all, or would somehow learn that they were in government custody indefinitely, or being deported?
I am a white citizen of the United States, and so I only have a second-hand understanding of the atrocities being perpetuated by our government against immigrants (and also against black and brown people regardless of citizenship status). Even so, I have reached an inescapable conclusion: our government is a terrorist organization. It is intentionally terrorizing individuals and families, including babies and children, to keep power and privilege in the hands of certain people, most of them cisgender, straight white men. (In other words, the people who have always held the most power in this nation.)
I have studied Holocaust literature (and the history it emerged from), and have said for more than two years that those of us in the United States need to be paying attention to the ways in which the Trump administration mirrors Hitler's regime. This morning's headlines are just one more echo of that terrible history.
Our government is putting people in concentration camps. Government agents are conducting raids and taking people away from their families. They are separating children and parents with no plans to reunite them, or even to ensure the children have their basic needs met (whether in detention themselves or left alone when parents are detained). The head of our government makes statements that inspire his followers to commit acts of violence and mass murder against people he has dehumanized in language and through policy.
If we are US citizens, this is being done in our names. We are the terrorists now.
If we are silent, we are the "everyday Germans" who pretended not to know what the Nazis were doing, or who believed it had nothing to do with them, or that there was nothing they could do about it.
When I studied the Holocaust, I also studied the rescuers, the resisters, the "righteous" who risked their own lives to save Jews and others threatened by the Nazi regime.
If you are not among the targeted, who will you be in this story? The perpetrator? The bystander? Or the resister?
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