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The assault on the system of women
power requires the
replacing of a peaceful, nonpunitive,
nonauthoritian
social system wherein women wield power by making
social life easy and gentle with one based on child terrorization,
male dominance, and submission of women to male authority.
Paula Gunn Allen,
The
first version of the Klan in the defeated American South
was arguably
a remarkable preview of the way fascist
movements were to function in
interwar Europe. It should
not be surprising, after all,that the
most precocious
democracies—the United States and
France— should
have generated precocious backlashes against
democracy.
I
use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal
sense
but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the
infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough
and
universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
James
Baldwin, “Down at the Cross,” The Fire Next Time
William
Shakespeare’s stand-in, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, refers
directly to the familial calamity that is the subjugation of
compassion, love, while indirectly exposing the State as corrupt and
murderous. What’s the Prince to do? He suspects and he’s
received a somewhat “ghostly” acknowledgment of
corruption and murder.
All is not well in Denmark! Nothing
good can come of this affront: kill a brother to gain
power.
Earlier, the King, Hamlet’s uncle and
step-father, newly married to Hamlet’s mother, suspecting
Hamlet’s unease, urges the Prince to be himself in Denmark.
Relax. All is well—or will be as soon as you, Hamlet, get on
board! Pretend you are free of any responsibility for the current
arraignment. It’s natural.
The foundation of the
State is thoroughly corrupt, and no amount of bribery is capable of
making Hamlet feign ignorance of the violence and its cover up.
And
Hamlet doesn’t procrastinate.
In the US today, that
is, not somewhere else, in some “enemy” or in some
“rogue” State, but in the US, in Clint, Texas, there were
children, toddlers to teenagers, held in filthy conditions at a
detention station, not fit for our fellow animal species.
“Children
as young as 7 and 8,” are being held at this site, according to
the reporters at the New York Times (June 21, 2019) who spoke with
lawyers on the scene.
“Many
of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for
infants they’ve just met… Toddlers without diapers are
relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing
clothes stained with breast milk.”
The
detention station personnel couldn’t see it in their agenda or
hearts to provide soap or toothbrushes for these children. The
conditions at the station, in general, were described as being
“unsanitary.” Several of the children were visibly sick
to the group of six lawyers who entered the detention site and spoke
with 60 of the 300 or so children, held in a room that, according to
attorney Warren Binford, speaking to a New
Yorker staff
member, appeared to be a “warehouse” with “no
windows” (June 22, 2019).
On
June 24, 2019, many of the children were transferred to another
facility in El Paso—another facility consisting of tents!
Tents! For babies and children. But wait! The next day, the children
are returned to the Clint detention station. And you have to asks—who
are these adults, those who should be caregivers, guardians to
children regardless of race or class, regardless of whether or not
these children are your “flesh and blood.” These are
children! Infants! And, let’s please stop with the “migrant
children.” These are children! Period!
And,
as if this narrative isn’t absurd enough, the children have
been returned to the Clint detention station—because no one on
the scene at US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) is thinking about the
children!
What
will be next in store for these children who’ve suffered
enough?
Luckily,
Attorney Binford isn’t remaining silent. Along with other
lawyers who’ve witnessed what seems to be a complete absence of
compassion at Clint, she speaking out on behalf of the children who
are suffering from the cruelty inflicted upon them by adults!
Binford, after talking with the children, is recounting to the press
what is actually happening at the US border to the least of us! To
babies and children under 18-years old. And, again, on US soil.
So
too, Attorney Elora Mukherjee, Director of the Immigrant’
Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, is telling a very different
narrative from that in which the US is the land of the free and
brave. No one is free in the scenario Mukherjee describes, and the
only brave ones are the children themselves, doing the best they can
to remain human in a human-made scenario intended to dehumanize them.
Caring for one another, the children are the brave ones made to
exist, as Mukherjee describe, in the “stench” because
“the overwhelming majority of children have not bathed since
they crossed the border.” In her description, we see a teen
mother soiled with breast milk as is her 5 month old infant. We see
children hungry because barely feed and the food itself should never
have been given to any human being, let alone children.
And
the influenza and lice!
What
in the lives of these adults brings them to this moment when, in the
presence of these attorneys, they insist on their “innocence”?
It’s the children not us, huh? The five month old, too? The
cover up always begins in a cloak of innocence.
(Claudius,
celebrating his coronation joyously, wore his crown well).
At
the Texas border, children separated from their parents are
reclassified as being “unaccompanied” children, according
to the New
York Times. “We
don’t know where the parents are being kept, Binford told the
New
Yorker.
And
do you think the Americans working for the CBP at Clint care where
the parents are located?
What
have these children done to be treated so cruelly by a Christian
nation? How can anyone expect good to come from the attempt to
dehumanize children? This unholy alliance of hate and cruelty rests
on the adults—the ordinary citizen, worker, family members
themselves, aligning themselves with the States murderous spirit! The
US is a collection of people, a segment of humanity. Is this nation
to continue holding on to aspects of itself that have engaged in
indifference when it comes to the torturing and the murdering of
fellow human beings?
Too
many Americans, ordinary citizens, adults have given in to
perpetuating violence against the little ones! The visibly deplorable
conditions at Clint best represents not the children’s state of
mind but rather how the process of dehumanizing ordinary Americans is
what’s really going on at the detention center in Clint, Texas.
It’s
not new. In US history, the subjugated narrative of violence
overflows with separated children—black children of enslaved
mothers, shipped off to other plantations, and Indigenous children,
separated from parents to be “educated” in “Americanism.”
And
now children from South America… But I think this is a repeat
too!
When
will this practice of cruelty and indifference ever end?
And
is anyone talking about the US’s role in destroying the chances
of democracy and freedom in places like Guatemala or Columbia, or for
that matter Haiti or Mexico? No, because such a transforming behavior
would require that ordinary Americans look inward. Self-reflection
it’s called. But no—to depressing, on the one hand,
while, on the other, it’s so much easier to point the finger at
little brown children and think of them as “the enemy.”
Little
gangsters in the making, says Trump!
Nothing
good can come from this!
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