It was my first day of preschool and something wasn’t quite right. After we walked into the classroom, they had the mothers sit in the front of the class while the kids were sent into the rest of the room to play. I didn’t know what was about to happen, but I could only half-heartedly play with the toys and other kids. Most of the time my eyes were watching my Mom, making sure she was still there, too scared to face the unfathomable idea that she was going to leave me there. When it came time for the parents to go, I was inconsolable.
For two days I hid under a table with another child named Jeff, who would become a friend and eventually kill himself when we in high school. On those first days, separated from our mothers for the first time, he shared a tissue with me because we were both crying under that table. We were lucky though. Our Moms were right there, waiting for us at the end of the half-day.
In our country right now, there are kids who no longer have that. Kids who have been ripped from their parents, sometimes literally, in Donald Trump’s horrid zero-tolerance border policy that separates parents from their children even in legitimate cases of seeking asylum. I never thought this country would sink so low, and while I rarely delve into politics on this blog (I usually save such ire for Twitter) this time is too much.
Last night, news broke that it wasn’t just kids – the government had opened three ‘tender age’ shelters for babies and toddlers who had been separated from their parents. In these cages, border guards are reportedly instructed not to touch or hold these children, and if there’s one thing I know from studying and reading and simply existing as a child once myself, that is horrific. It goes against the very essence of humanity. It is cruel, malicious, evil, destructive, and will cause irreparable damage to those children.
On my first day of kindergarten, I felt the same fear as I felt in preschool. When it was time for the parents to leave, I climbed into the teacher’s lap, just to be held. I still remember the tiny bit of comfort it afforded me. I remember her green dress, silky and soft, and how my quiet tears stained it in spots.
Four decades later I still remember those first days of school, how traumatic and upsetting they were, and I cry at the idea of what might be happening to those children whose mother or father won’t be waiting for them a few hours later.
I think of those children in cages now, and how they aren’t allowed to be touched or held. What is happening to them? What terrors have been unleashed upon their childhoods? What immeasurable damage is being wrought? No one is there to hold or comfort them. They are alone in a foreign country. Innocent and unable sometimes to even communicate. And now we are being told that thanks to this policy and the unpreparedness of our government to deal with so many, there’s a good chance some won’t ever be reunited with their parents. What does that do to a person? What does that do to a child?
America, under the ruinous govern of Donald Trump, has done this – is doing this, right now as you read these words. It is not a law, it is a policy enforced by Trump and this cruel administration, enabled by the GOP that controls all branches of government. If Trump wanted to do so, he could go back to what we did before he entered office, which was simply not to separate families. He could end it with a single phone call. But he is not doing that because he is a heartless and horrible person who doesn’t understand empathy or human compassion. He sees these children as political bargaining chips, and too bad if they have to rip a baby out of its mother’s arms to make a point and appeal to his deplorable base.
This needs to be everybody’s breaking point.
One day some of those children will tell their story. They will explain in eloquence and pain what they went through, and what each complicit individual did to get them there. We will, all of us, have to answer for what we did when it started happening. I don’t have the power to do much, but I can write. I can post this. I can call anyone in power who will listen. I can speak out and resist every single thing this administration tries to do from this day forward and do my best to kill every item on their hateful agenda. I will not give the benefit of the doubt, I will not normalize these atrocities, and I will not allow a lie to be placed on the same level as the truth simply because someone else believes in it. I will support everyone who fights against this administration, in whatever way they choose to do so, no matter how crude or rude or debasing it may seem. Fuck Trump. Fuck Pence. Fuck Ivanka. Fuck the GOP.
Every single thing they do must be stopped because the alternative is too frightening to imagine.
{You can call the Department of Homeland Security at 202-282-8000 and let your stance on the family separation policy be known. You can also find your own representative in Congress to speak out against Trump’s policy by calling this toll-free number: 844-872-0234. In my case, it was Kirsten Gillibrand, who has been faithfully fighting Trump every step of the way. I simply left the following message: “As one of your constituents, I just want to register my discontent with Donald Trump’s family separation policy, and hope you will continue to do everything in your power to stop every item on Trump’s agenda.†If I had a different representative, I might have worded it a little differently, but every call counts. We can no longer rely on our government to stop the inhumanity, we have to collectively speak out against it. America was never about one person, it was about all of us, and that’s what it’s going to take to stop this.}
PS – The latest news has it that Trump is signing something that says we will no longer separate families. That is not enough. Thousands of families have already been separated. Some will never find their way back to each other. The damage has been done. Damage that was directly inflicted and kept going by Trump himself. He didn’t need a grand signing ceremony to stop his own policy. You can’t start a fire and then get credit for putting it out. This changes nothing. He must be stopped at every turn and on every front.
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