What Are We Doing?

Today at her daily press briefing (lol) Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the cruel separation of parents from children by saying “It is biblical to follow laws.”

Two things.

1. No it isn’t.

2. It’s not the law to steal children from their asylum seeking parents and stuff them in prison camps.

The Bible can be vague on certain things. Jesus speaks in lots of parables and word games, but on this, Jesus is explicit and clear:

Matthew 25:35

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed meFor I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

Luke 10:27

“And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

The Hebrew Scripture (Old Testament) is even more explicit:

"So you too should love the resident alien, for that is what you were in the land of Egypt." Deuteronomy 10:19

Furthermore,  it is explicitly not biblical to follow unjust laws, or to hide behind law as a smokescreen for other heinous actions. See: the healing of the man on the sabbath (Mark 3:1-6) and the exceedingly specific woes upon the Pharisees (Luke 11:37-54, Matt 23:1-39).

My point, here, however, is not to argue with the twisted fundamentalist distortion of the Christian scriptures. 

My point here is to ask:

What are we doing?

Kids—eight month old babies, being ripped away from their parents, separated from their siblings, and thrown into an old abandoned Walmart, shuffled past a mural of Donald Trump with a vaguely ominous and nonsensical slogans and given strictly enforced times to run around, eating in mess halls that look like prison cafeterias.

Children  have been “taken “by Border Patrol agents who said they were going to give them a bath. As the hours passed, it dawned on the mothers the kids were not coming back.””

I’ve been blogging into the wind long enough to have no illusions that this will be read by more than six people, but what else can I do? I sit here and I see what is happening and I am at turns terrified and furious. This is systematic oppression of a minority. It is a cruelty explicitly instated at the federal level that is unprecedented in the modern era.

I see people constantly say “This is not who we are.”

But isn’t it?

Isn’t this exactly who we are and who we have been for years? 

I know that we’ve been keeping immigrants, including children, locked up in detention centers on the border for years. Not too long ago, I spent an evening flooding my congressman’s Facebook page with images of ICE detention centers, trying in vain to get the racist entitled old white man to back a humane immigration system.

This is a country of racism—institutionally and culturally. We throw black kids and black men into jails over minor offenses, and leave them there for the rest of their lives. Around 13% of the population of the United States  is African American. They make up 35% of jail inmates and 37% of prison inmates. Back in 2009, almost a full 5% of all African American adult males were incarcerated.

And this is what we do to kids on the border, just because they’re brown.

Donald Trump and his Republican Party continue to criminalize all non-white Christians. They’ve banned Muslims from coming into the country, made social media checks a standard practice, want to crack down on minor drug offenses that inordinately impact black men, they scapegoat Mexicans as murderers and gang members. “Animals,” they say, then get defensive and clarify they’re just talking about MS-13, even though everyone knows they only use MS-13 to mask their virulent racism. In defense of the White Supremacist killing of a protestor, Donald Trump said there were “Good people on both sides.”

There was a time it almost seemed like we were getting better, right? But the sheer hate for a black man being in charge caused the racist underbelly of this nation to erupt and claw its way into the mainstream of American society.

He was born in Kenya.

He’s a Muslim who wants to overtake the nation and throw it into Sharia law.

They cloak their hate in Christ and St. Paul. They dare us to “defy” the leader at our peril. They want to put in place a Theocratic Authoritarian state wherein their conception of Christianity (one that defies all calls toward mercy, service and preferential treatment of the poor) is the law of the land. Where being an immigrant is a crime, where to be Muslim is to be second class, where being black defines you as less worthy of decency and respect.

Listen, I am Catholic. I am not against your faith being an important part of your political life, and informing your views. 

But this is not the same thing. 

Jesus lays it out clearly for us:

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

We are meant to support the broken and battered and beaten. We are meant to share our wealth with the poor, to literally share our table with the outcast.

We dance around these threats of authoritarianism and say “it can never happen here,” but it has happened and continues to happen before our eyes as we sit and watch children ripped away from their mothers at the border. Mothers escaping violence, fearing for their lives, who come to this country because we have told the world: You are welcome here.

The Trump administration is doing damage to a lot of things. It is ostracizing us from our global allies, throwing money away at corporations, flirting with authoritarians abroad.

As a nation, we can come back from economic downturns. You can fix broken international trade relationships.

What is much harder to come back from is this moral rot at the center of this country, the one we have ignored for over 250 years, that has returned to remind us that we are a nation of delusion. 

We are fed American exceptionalism. We are fed the lie that we are the “Greatest country in the World.”

All as we imprison black men at alarming rates. As we lock up children on the border. As we penalize the poor and rip healthcare away from the sick. As they cloak it in lies and twist their religious texts into justification for their cruelty and their greed.

This country is battered and bruised and sick and we all sit here on our phones and our computers. We balk and laugh at the antics of a foolish, racist man and his cronies of racists, oligarchs, and authoritarians. We have ignored the clear signs of a broken political life, content to assume that others will vote for the right person, or lying to ourselves that “all politicians are the same.” These things don’t affect me. They won’t be as bad as everyone says.

What are we doing when we sit and see the horror of broken families, broken because we fed them a lie, and we do nothing? 

What will it take for the dam to burst, for things to be so morally repugnant and unacceptable that we are shaken from our apathy? What will it take me to do more than sit here and type words into the void? 

We are at a moral tipping point. This is beyond politics as we have ever known it in this country. This is egregiously abnormal, and we are lied to at every turn and told we are overreacting. This is beyond political parties and even religious vs. nonreligious. How do we come back from accepting, as a society, forcing severe trauma upon innocent children? All to benefit the engines of war and oppression? 

This is not even the worst of it. Literal camps are coming, “tent cities” built by our government to house kids stolen from their parents. Tent cities in the triple digit summer Texas heat. We'll find euphemisms to avoid calling these encampments what they are. We've seen it before. 

I have no answers. We have sat by and allowed a federal police force to round up and detain immigrants with no due process in inhumane conditions for years.  We have let this fester because it is easier not to think about. Are we too late? 

You can call your representatives—but banking on a Republican politician to care about institutionalizing racism is like asking a tiger to change its stripes. It just does not happen. But what else is there for us to do? 

We can vote -- and the only moral vote to put an end to these deeply racist, deeply dangerous, and deeply immoral policies is one to remove every Trump sycophant and enabler in Congress.

But these heinous attitudes do not end whenever Trump and his kind are out of politics. They are a part of the American fabric. Is there any coming back? Is there redemption for the American soul?

What are we doing?

What are we doing?