Today I cried for the first time since Christine Blasey Ford gave her testimony in front of Congress. It was that same bubbling over of empathy I felt, when I placed myself where she was and imagined telling the hardest truth I’d ever tell in front of an indifferent and toxic congregation.
I guess some people have learned what they’ll accept alongside their own comfort. They can hear stories of seven-year-olds denied a bath for over a month, forced to care for an infant to which they have no blood relation, lying on cold cement floors among thousands of others living the same reality. They can hear stories of physical, mental and sexual abuse perpetrated by people paid with our tax dollars. They can imagine a mother and son or father and daughter or sisters or brothers torn away from each other, possibly forever. And they are comfortable.
I’m not comfortable.
Over the last few weeks, as more atrocities have been revealed, as tens of thousands of migrant children have become detained and abused within privately owned detention centers, I’ve heard nonstop about the power of law, the meaning of “legal” and “illegal,” and about what is right and what is wrong. One justification after another spoken with privileged tongue, telling me the right way to flee a war-torn country, and what to expect when it’s done the wrong way.
Is this what we’re accepting as the inherent solution to our immigration problem? Not reform, not sensible and compassionate policies. Children in cages, subjected to one human rights violation after another? This is what we’re considering to be “just” now?
I don’t recognize my country. But, maybe it’s just the disillusionment of growing up. Maybe we really have always been this way.
What do people stand for when they stand for the flag or the anthem anymore? I want to know, what are you proud of?