This afternoon, I told Mike I was too tired after work to go protest
against Immigration taking children away from their families. I was
tired, but I know I should have gone anyway. I was a little afraid to show up at a detention center, but I should have gone anyway.
It's heinous to separate children from families seeking refuge. It is evil.
It will cause irreparable damage to those children. Their brain development will actually change. It will affect their ability to learn and they will be more susceptible to anxiety for the rest of their lives.
Think about this: these children are being housed in a warehouse with concrete floors and chain link fences. If you haven't looked at the photos, then close your eyes and imagine a four-year-old under a blanket that looks like it's made out of tin foil, on a narrow bed that didn't appear to have a mattress, at a place that looks like your local animal shelter. One photo showed a flat-screen TV, but the child in the foreground stood looking through fencing to see it. There were no chairs in sight.
I don't even like the idea of my dog going to a place like that and my dog is a shelter dog.
What kind of country have we become that children aren't housed with their families in ordinary rooms with normal beds and real comforters? Why can't we afford to offer them comfortable chairs where their parents might hold them?
So this morning at work, I sat with children privileged enough to afford to be tutored, children from Peru, China, Korea, and India. We had a diverse group. This afternoon, I talked with Boy Scouts, again primarily privileged enough to be driven around in new SUVs and oversized trucks by their dads. Some of them talked to me about heading to college at expensive schools across the country. They are all the sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of immigrants. How do I know? With some, I have heard their family stories, recent or distant immigration from a variety of countries. With the others, I can assume they are immigrants simply because they are not Native American.
Part of my family immigrated in the 1800s. It's mortifying to admit, buy one branch of my family came from the same region as Donald Trump's. Even he is an immigrant. My sister, the genealogy buff, said some of us came over earlier than that. I like to imagine that someone in my line arrived and floated past the new Statue of Liberty in its original colors, the brown of a penny, before thirty years of New York weather oxidized its surface into the green that we see now. I like to think that someone spoke her verses in their languages, those words that read of hope for the newly arrived.
In 1883, Emma Lazarus wrote a sonnet to raise money to fund the placement of the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Even though that was her message, we haven't been kind to each wave of immigrants that has arrived. The Irish used to be considered untrustworthy. Italians were said to be unclean. I remember jokes about Polish people's intelligence. I read that the Chinese who built the railroad were considered expendable. Mexicans are but the latest wave.
But according to Rachel Maddow, we have never before separated immigrants and refuges from their children. She said it can take up to 45 days for these kids to be connected with sponsors because they've added this new procedure without having the logistics in place to accommodate them.
So, children are forcibly taken from their parents, babies and toddlers too, and are being housed in cages.
CAGES.
I should never be too tired to protest against children in cages. None of us should be too tired or too busy to protest children being torn from their parents' arms and put into cages.
Seriously.
Thank you for listening, jules
It's heinous to separate children from families seeking refuge. It is evil.
It will cause irreparable damage to those children. Their brain development will actually change. It will affect their ability to learn and they will be more susceptible to anxiety for the rest of their lives.
Think about this: these children are being housed in a warehouse with concrete floors and chain link fences. If you haven't looked at the photos, then close your eyes and imagine a four-year-old under a blanket that looks like it's made out of tin foil, on a narrow bed that didn't appear to have a mattress, at a place that looks like your local animal shelter. One photo showed a flat-screen TV, but the child in the foreground stood looking through fencing to see it. There were no chairs in sight.
I don't even like the idea of my dog going to a place like that and my dog is a shelter dog.
What kind of country have we become that children aren't housed with their families in ordinary rooms with normal beds and real comforters? Why can't we afford to offer them comfortable chairs where their parents might hold them?
So this morning at work, I sat with children privileged enough to afford to be tutored, children from Peru, China, Korea, and India. We had a diverse group. This afternoon, I talked with Boy Scouts, again primarily privileged enough to be driven around in new SUVs and oversized trucks by their dads. Some of them talked to me about heading to college at expensive schools across the country. They are all the sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of immigrants. How do I know? With some, I have heard their family stories, recent or distant immigration from a variety of countries. With the others, I can assume they are immigrants simply because they are not Native American.
Part of my family immigrated in the 1800s. It's mortifying to admit, buy one branch of my family came from the same region as Donald Trump's. Even he is an immigrant. My sister, the genealogy buff, said some of us came over earlier than that. I like to imagine that someone in my line arrived and floated past the new Statue of Liberty in its original colors, the brown of a penny, before thirty years of New York weather oxidized its surface into the green that we see now. I like to think that someone spoke her verses in their languages, those words that read of hope for the newly arrived.
In 1883, Emma Lazarus wrote a sonnet to raise money to fund the placement of the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Even though that was her message, we haven't been kind to each wave of immigrants that has arrived. The Irish used to be considered untrustworthy. Italians were said to be unclean. I remember jokes about Polish people's intelligence. I read that the Chinese who built the railroad were considered expendable. Mexicans are but the latest wave.
But according to Rachel Maddow, we have never before separated immigrants and refuges from their children. She said it can take up to 45 days for these kids to be connected with sponsors because they've added this new procedure without having the logistics in place to accommodate them.
So, children are forcibly taken from their parents, babies and toddlers too, and are being housed in cages.
CAGES.
I should never be too tired to protest against children in cages. None of us should be too tired or too busy to protest children being torn from their parents' arms and put into cages.
Seriously.
Thank you for listening, jules
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