Take a few seconds to look at the photograph that accompanies this column. Baby Anthony, a beautiful one-year-old American citizen, is a descendant of Mexican immigrants, one of countless innocent children upon whom we depend to guide us into the future.
In “Blood Red Syrah,” I describe Mexican-American children just like him, wonderful, loving children full of life, laughter and trust. I based those happy children in my novel on what I learned from real Mexican-American children I know and love, vulnerable little explorers to a new world that must always offer refuge and safe haven for them and those like them.
I stand with them.
I’ll always stand with them.
Yet, as a nation, we stand painfully divided. Enmity defines our deadly national past-time. Our self-absorbed cruelty will deepen unless we stand for what is right and not what lurks in the savage shadows on the right. America lives on the promise of goodness. Storm troopers who blindly follow their cold ignorant hearts into a ruthless 21st Century ice age of All-American despair will deliver us to evil.
If their violence prevails, America will die.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have become masters of pain. These Department of Homeland Security enforcers easily deny and deprive children in their custody and elsewhere of love and mercy. Even good ICE cops are just following orders.
Federal immigration officials raided several food-processing plants in Mississippi on Wednesday and arrested approximately 680 people believed to be working in the U.S. without authorization, according to NPR. The coordinated raids were conducted by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations “at seven agricultural processing plants across Mississippi,” according to an ICE statement.
More than 600 ICE agents were involved in the raids, surrounding the perimeters of the targeted plants to prevent workers, mainly Latino immigrants, from escaping. The actions were centered on plants near Jackson owned by five companies, according to The Associated Press.
Many traumatized children waited for parents who never picked them up at day care, school or made it home to tuck them into bed at night. Many children didn’t have a loved one or family friend to go home to. Some walked home from school but were locked out because their parents were detained in the raid, according to the Washington Post.
Volunteers set up a makeshift shelter for the children at a local gym, WJTV’s Alex Love reported. There was food, “but most children are still devastated and crying for their parents and can’t eat,” Love said on Twitter.
The history of Nazi Germany provides grim warning of hate-filled ideology and blind obedience. Lessons of other genocides remain etched in the grisly timeline of world history. Our American border concentration camps have not yet turned into wholesale death camps. Still, cruelty in our name has laid a fatal foundation of bigotry and provoked mass death by gunfire that can only lead to more murder.
We might never turn away from violence and white nationalism. It might already be too late. The intersection of guns and racism is our national cross to bear. I have severe doubts that Americans are up to the job.
In the wake of recent disasters I’ve heard nothing that exhibits leadership or moral courage from my white male gun-owning Congressman Matt Cartwright or neighbor and timid U.S. Senator Bob Casey. These aloof bourgeois Democrats live in a privileged fundraising bubble of political fear that moderate white voters might abandon them.
In our shameless unwillingness to do all we can to curtail continuing mass shootings and hatred, America sacrifices honor. By defending weak self-interests, we allow government to dehumanize and carry out brutal immigration policies.
The only way America might save itself is to recognize a changing demographic, a new American face, a brown face of tomorrow that offers what’s left of hope for the survival of the American Dream.
If not, we risk losing our sacred vision of democracy forever.