We now have yet another outrage to add to the growing list of U.S. government atrocities in the 21st century. The competition to make the list is keen. Just take a moment and consider some of the recent U.S. contributions to global peace and prosperity since the dawn of the new century.
No. 1 is the Iraq war, an invasion based on repeated lies by President George W. Bush and other government officials that there were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. Let’s not forget torture and extraordinary rendition, the CIA’s practice of whisking away some poor person for a couple of months of waterboarding in some foreign black ops bunker. The rejection by the Trump administration of the science that tells us that heat-trapping gases are a threat to our existence deserves its high spot on the list. Imposing tariffs on virtually every one of our trading partners is now making a robust effort to join the list, too.
The newest member of the list, however, is the recent revelation that agents of the federal government are separating children from their parents at the border and then carting the wailing boys and girls off to an abandoned Walmart to live for who knows how long and under what conditions. A tent city is supposedly in the works to ease the anticipated overcrowding that will occur as this odious new policy results in the separation of thousands more children from their parents.
Of all the utter nonsense that spews forth daily from Washington, D.C., perhaps none is more diabolical than this new effort to deter illegal entry into the U.S. What has happened to this once-great nation of immigrants and descendants from Africa? Why are we so afraid of the “other” that we would dare sink to such depravity as separating parent from child? Is it because they have brown skin and speak Spanish?
Mark Latham
Hartford
What has the United States come to? Separating children from their hopeful immigrant parents at the border? Child abuse conducted by the highest level of U.S. government? Both Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders quote the Bible in defense of this action. What kind of warped Christianity is that?
What would Jesus do? Undoubtedly throw the Republican Pharisees out of the White House temple. Disgraceful.
Rosamond Orford
Norwich
Hundreds of immigrant children at the southern border of the United States have been separated from their parents and are being housed in mass shelters.
President Donald Trump misrepresents the truth in blaming the Democrats for this situation. Immigration law is written by Congress, but the executive branch can choose to enforce the law by placing families together in immigration detention, rather than putting parents in jail. To protect immigrants’ human rights and encourage the speedy resolution of their cases, the law limits the time families can wait in detention before being released.
For Trump, laws that protect human rights are inconvenient obstacles and their authors need to be bullied into compliance. His attitude is arrogant and simplistic. It is also actively cruel to small, bewildered children who have already endured extreme physical and psychological hardships.
Children are being harmed by the Trump administration’s policy at this very moment, and it is only a matter of time before we begin to hear about children dying in U.S. custody. People of conscience are called upon to oppose the administration’s separation policy, and to voice our opposition loudly.
Abigail Fleming
Bradford, Vt.
If President Donald Trump’s vision of “make America great” means separating immigrant children from their parents, or deporting a man who has lived here for 30 years and is in need of a kidney transplant, or undermining health care for the needy, then I would move that we try to “make America humane again.”
Do we really want to return to the biased prejudicial social norms of the 1950s? I encourage all who want a more humane America, and especially the young people of voting age, to please make your voice heard in the coming elections. Support candidates who believe in improving the quality of life, rather than bolstering their ego and pocketbooks.
William Rosen
Hanover
The respect for the state that St. Paul commends (of which Attorney General Jeff Sessions makes so much) is prudential counsel given to Jesus’ followers for making their way in a fallen world. In a sinful world, ways are needed for minimizing disorder. Reason makes it self-evident that the state and its laws are a useful instrument in this regard.
In this, Paul and other early church fathers were in agreement with the Stoic philosophers of the time who bemoaned the passing of a Golden Age. But the state for Paul was a penultimate good; its laws and emperors were to be respected, not worshipped. Early Christians both refused to worship the emperor as a god or to perform military service, even though citizens were expected to. They objected to capital punishment as well. Believers serving as judges for the state would not order executions.
Sessions would, it seems, have Americans worship the state as if its laws, policies and practices (including the incarceration of immigrant children) were all infallible. To suggest that the state and its ordinances are from and “by God” is little more than a form of bigotry — the word “bigot” being derived, according to one theory, from the oath “by God,” sworn by those who would claim ultimate authority for their actions and opinions. It comes close to being in violation of the Third Commandment.
Christopher L. Chase
Hanover
In one of my favorite films, The Official Story, the mother of a disappeared daughter says to the woman who has unknowingly adopted the first woman’s granddaughter, “Don’t cry. Crying doesn’t help.”
Neither does hand-wringing, or the nightly reviling of President Donald Trump and his administration over the dinner table.
The list of ongoing worldwide atrocities and crimes against humanity about which our faith communities should be holding vigils and organizing boycotts is too long to submit here. So I’ll limit myself to the specter of small children being “housed” in tent cities and incarcerated in what used to be a Walmart. Seriously? And the doors of every church, synagogue, mosque, religious center and fraternal lodge in this country aren’t spilling open with a surge of the morally outraged?
I’m not a joining kind of gal so you are my fellow parishioners, as it were. Let us review history. Even Jewish Americans were afraid to speak up too loudly while Hitler was turning much of our tribe to ashes. President Clinton’s administration refused to use the word “genocide” because doing so would oblige us to intervene in Rwanda.
Aren’t we supposed to be the good guys?
The time to act was yesterday. Are we going to do anything tomorrow?
Sarah Crysl Akhtar
Lebanon