It is with shock and outrage that the New England Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy takes a stand against the policy of the U.S. government to separate children from their families at our southern border.
The research that informs our practice of family and couple therapy makes clear in no uncertain terms that prolonged separation of children from their parents has traumatic repercussions, both short and long term, making this an unconscionable act of cruelty. Depending on the age, such separations are known to have a deleterious impact on the emotional, physical and social development of the child creating a lifetime of impairment, not to mention the devastating heartbreak for the parents.
Neither parents nor children know when or whether they will be reunited with one another, an uncertainty that has profound repercussions emotionally. Compounding the horror is the fact that the caretakers in charge are forbidden from physically comforting even a 2-year-old who is crying in distress.
Our expertise and clinical experience inform our condemnation of this inhumane policy on the part of the Trump administration. There is no law that justifies such treatment of children and families. Children should not be used as pawns in a political impasse.
Jill Fischer
Lebanon
The writer is the director of the New England Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy.
How does this country dare to castigate other countries for human rights abuses when it is committing the horrific abuse of children right here on its own territory?
Tearing children away from their parents, most of whom are seeking asylum here, loading them into a plane (itself a terrible trauma as the majority of these children have never flown in one), and then keeping them in warehouses, empty Walmart buildings and who knows where else and under what terrible conditions? And mostly there is not even communication between the frantic parents and their lost children.
It is totally unbelievable to me that this incredibly cruel and disgusting situation is allowed to go on. Where are the international agencies that protect children throughout the world? Where are our domestic child protection agencies? Why is the government even thinking of allowing this inhumane process?
It matters not what political persuasion (or none) you are, we must all — every one of us — speak out on behalf of these traumatized, terrified and bewildered children.
I try not to be angry but this time I am. Please join me and speak up, write, just do something, anything, to end this abuse.
Rosalind Finn
South Strafford
As a former child protective services worker, I am horrified by the immigration policy that requires federal employees to take children from their parents. We know, and the federal government, basing its policies on science, knows that one of the worst things one can do to a child, no matter what is going on in the family, is to separate the child from her or his parents. With the federal government’s assistance and support, we worked to preserve families whenever possible.
Now this same government has instituted a policy of child torture that is unimaginable.
I am ashamed that my country is taking children, after an already-grueling trauma in getting here, from their only connection with reality and life: their parents. This is entirely unacceptable. I hope that those reading this will write to their congressional delegation and urge them to stop this intolerable and cruel practice.
Leane Page Garland
Hanover
So this is who we have become: a people who stand by when children are torn out of the arms of their parents, a people who seem to lack empathy with the most vulnerable human beings, a people who seem to lack imagination. How would you feel if your child were forcefully taken away from you and you might not understand why or know whether you’d ever see her again? Are we so deaf to the desperate cries of little people who, so we always claim, are the future of this planet? Regardless of religious beliefs, Attorney General Jeff Session’s comments justifying an inhumane practice with a quote from the New Testament are outrageous.
It is time to take action.
Please call the Department of Justice’s comment line at 202-353-1555, or write to U.S. Department of Justice, 950 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20530-0001.
Ulrike Rainer
Hanover
I refer to the Tribune News Service opinion column by Larry Dansinger (“Time to Divest From Wall Street and Invest Locally,” June 14). This is a perfect example of a column that the editors of the Valley News should have used their intellectual acumen to keep on the cutting room floor.
The proposed investment strategy is riddled with uniformed statements:
Investing in Wall Street has provided long-term returns averaging about 8 percent a year, thus allowing long-term investors to grow their actual wealth because the rate of return exceeds the rate of inflation.
Investing in municipal bonds arguably does not even maintain the investor’s inflation-adjusted purchasing power.
There are significant hurdles to investing in equity of local businesses as a basic investment strategy.
There is no market for tiny local business equities.
The rate of failure of small businesses is about 75 percent, so about three in four of the investments will entail a loss of money.
The possible market is so tiny that it does not offer a real vehicle as an investment strategy.
The article is filled with conflated assertions that are not causally or logically related. Especially egregious is the assertion that investing in the regular stock market contributes to the wealth gap in the U.S. Should we be tearing down an entire structure to cure a logically unrelated item?
To assert that Wall Street in and of itself contributes to teen pregnancy, obesity and mental illness lacks any semblance of direct logic and causality. This assertion is progressive Ludditism bordering on witch-doctorism.
I’d hope the editors would do a better job of not spreading emotional rants full of errors and actual misleading words. This opinion column is not information. It’s either deliberately misleading or the rants of the uninformed.
Paul Tierney
Norwich
I couldn’t agree more with Larry Dansinger’s opinion column (“Time to Divest From Wall Street and Invest Locally,” June 14). But what if you, like me, don’t have thousands to invest or divest? You can still take concrete steps — one or many — to support our local economy.
Some ideas: Shop at food co-ops, worker cooperatives and employee-owned companies; bank with locally owned community banks or credit unions; shop at locally owned businesses that support and invest in the community (see the list of Local First Alliance members at vitalcommunities.org); buy directly from farms and farmers markets; support local musicians, artists and theaters; go to local sporting events; donate to local charitable organizations.
For more on the broader issues, see Vermonters for a New Economy (www.neweconomyvt.org) and learn about how the formation of a state or public bank in Vermont can keep our tax dollars closer to home and about the local multiplier (or “ripple”) effect. Search the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ilsr.org) to learn why chain stores do more harm than good to local economies.
Read books, such as Born on Third Base, by Chuck Collins, Big-Box Swindle, by Stacy Mitchell, The Local Economy Solution, by Michael Shuman, and Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money, by Woody Tasch, and publications such as Yes Magazine, which gives real-life examples of people building their local communities in myriad ways, big and small.
This is not a partisan issue. I believe that people of all political parties (or none) care about their hometowns and local regions, the places where their kids grow up and where they live, work and play. We can all find ways to contribute.
Debra L. Diegoli
Weathersfield Bow