Few issues have hit me as hard as knowing that our government has taken thousands of children away from their parents and locked them in cages, in order to punish the families for walking in the wrong spot when fleeing violence and seeking asylum. In fact, our government has been atrocious in the last couple of years, when it comes to refusing to help refugees from all over the world. We are slamming a lot of doors in a lot of faces, and not all of us enjoy seeing that happen. I don't understand how a nation of immigrants (and yes, if your name is Smith, Jones, Miller, Conroy, Andersen, or any other similar name, your ancestors were immigrants here too) can be so hateful towards people who are still trying to come here. It shouldn't be this hard. It shouldn't be an unnecessarily prohibitive process. It actually has a positive effect on our economy.
But I am digressing. It's the children. This is what is tearing me apart. Children are suffering in order to punish and hold leverage over adults. The toxic stress that they are experiencing is damaging them in the short and long term. It's shortening their life spans and changing the neural pathways in their brains. They will never, ever recover fully from this. It will always be with them. It is state-sponsored child abuse. And for what? Because the current administration wants to deny asylum claims? Asylum is *legal* immigration, but it has been blocked and denied and punished. It has made people desperate, and they are making calculations no parent should be forced to make, whether to risk family separations in the US or returning to the countries they are fleeing, where they are guaranteed to be killed.
This topic makes me so sputteringly angry that I can barely even write about it right now. I've erased more than I've left in so far. Today, I needed to be around people who are as upset as I am, and I went to the local #KeepFamiliesTogetherMarch. I tried to come up with a sign to hold, to express how angry this policy makes me. Nothing seemed right to put on a poster board, and eventually I accepted that holding a sign would have made my hands hurt anyway and sent me home sooner. Instead, I let my shirt do the talking, and I wore a #basta shirt (the Italian exclamation meaning "Enough!") and a couple of pins I picked up last week at the Pride parade, "Love over Fear," and "Vote, F*cker!" I am so glad I went down, even without something to hold. There have been people on this streetcorner for months, every Saturday from 1-2. I've seen them, and there's rarely been more than 6-8 people. Today there were more like 150-200. We covered a full city block on one side, and two large groups on streetcorners on the other side.
Outside of football games, I'm not really good at chanting loudly about anything. I overcame my fear and answered when the call came out "Tell me what democracy looks like," and the crowd responded, "This is what democracy looks like!" There were other chants, but few stuck with me like this one. People are outraged, as am I. I needed to be reassured that we still have the power to change something. It's getting harder to believe that, when I can see the face of a child who doesn't understand why they were taken away from their mother or father, and made to sleep on a concrete floor, in a chain-link cage. This is something I cannot bear, and even I can be silent no longer.
I arrived about 5 minutes early, and already the crowd was building.
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