The Trail of Fears

Power really doesn’t belong to those who struggle. It belongs to those whose goal is to see to it that others struggle, to keep them preoccupied, busy, frantic, hurting. That way strugglers won’t have time or will be too worn out to spit back.

Attacking children, making them afraid and unhappy, which is exactly what’s happening in south Texas just as it did at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Santa Fe, etc., does not make those children who survive victims. Children who are sacrificed are in the crosshairs of adult misbehavior. Is making children afraid merely the angriest and most barbaric episode of self-loathing we can come up with this week?

We have seen drowned refugees float ashore in other countries. We have seen footage of Cubans flailing in the ocean trying to get to Florida. We have seen children scream for help from fires, dog bites, cancer and other things we couldn’t prevent.

But locking children up in Texas, Minnesota, wherever, is preventable.

It isn’t morality, legality, inhumanity, laziness, racism, capitalism or isolationism that has us fired up this time, it’s embarrassment. We are deathly afraid of what to do with people who are fleeing their homelands because they have no choice, and we don’t know what to do about it. So we come up with excuses and call them law, even though crime is down and jobs need filling.

Driving to work the other day I saw a hitchhiker. I looked right at him and passed him up. Let another car get him. Instead of flipping me the bird, he tipped his hat. It was a “You have a good morning anyway,” gesture that I’ve thought about for days. But I let him keep walking.

Then I wondered how did a group of people we elected to Congress, who have no interest in any of us or our plight, ever achieve this level of outright passing people up? These aren’t the guys who shook hands with us at the Beans and Barbecue For You, are they? Yes. Exactly the same people. Tom Cotton. Jeff Sessions. Mitch McConnell, et al.

This whole blot in south Texas is conjured up by a man whose family has made a minimum of $82 million in 17 months by doing nothing other than opening the door for others to meet with Dad.

Dad has blamed laws, Democrats, drugs, the Departments of Justice, Education and Homeland Security, and his own White House staff for every single cockeyed, tilted, other world utterance that has come out of his mouth.Yet the adults in the room, who apparently run the United States, back up claims that this was not his idea.

So who’s behind this? What do we do?

There are people connected to us, by land at the very least, carrying clothes, some water, some paperwork or pictures, a lucky rock, a child, walking hundreds, even a thousand, miles to be greeted by someone who doesn’t speak their language and is wearing sunglasses, a badge and a gun. Bienvenidos!

This is happening all over the world. This is not just about poverty, many of today’s refugees are pros – professors, artists, athletes, attorneys – who are under the constant threat of being killed because their own country wants to terrify them into submission. Hmmm.

Is our country trying to do the same thing? We did it to the five civilized tribes, the Cherokee in particular. People who were farmers and storytellers – monogamous, productive citizens, to whom we said, “No, that doesn’t work for us.”

Separating children from those they are accustomed to, those they are dependent on, is undeniably adult misbehavior. Many call it political, many say it’s immoral, many choose inhumane as their right word, but it’s really embarrassing.

We boil up because that’s a short, emotional way to look at things, and we play it out. We protest, threaten and march. Then we go back home and fret about children kidnapped from their parents by kidnappers we are paying to kidnap. And we sleep well. Because we are fed and have a bed, and everyone’s predicament is their own doing.

If it were that simple, if we were that heartless, this would be easy.

This barbarity says more about us than about our leaders. So, power – if we don’t have it do we even want it?

Mary Pat Boian