Families Belong TOGETHER

Every minute of every day…

As you tapped or clicked “Continue reading,” a baby cried with no one to comfort her. A youngster, a stranger, changed a toddler’s diaper. A boy sat motionless in a large, crowded space with dazed eyes — sullen, silent, somber.

We, some of us, interrupt our lives with protests, texts, or calls to a representative. We write letters, draft emails, talk to neighbors.

We work. We eat. We sleep.

And as we engage in our lives, thousands of children experience existence in a terrifying universe, minute by minute.

But you know all that. And you know that while you read these words, a five-year-old goes to court, alone. A toddler refuses to eat. A mother keens for her child.

Though a federal judge ordered the Trump regime to reunite families, many children have already been dispersed to distant places. Many parents have already been deported. Neither records, nor organizations, nor mechanisms were created to keep track of them. No one bothered. These were sub humans, after all. As a result, reuniting families may be impossible.

It seems unfathomable, but it’s not—not for this regime, not for this country. Here, zero tolerance is only the most recent incarnation of a dehumanizing narrative that dates back to the beginning…

• To Europeans pushing native people off the land
• To the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787, which legitimized counting the population of formerly enslaved people as three-fifths of their white counterparts
• To the passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, but left a huge loophole that allows slavery as punishment for a crime as simple as loitering: the beginning of mass incarceration
• To the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which suspended immigration of people from China
• To denying citizenship for over 40 percent of Native Americans until 1924, when the Indian Citizenship Act passed
• To the Muslim ban

Make no mistake. These actions, and so many others, are part of a conscious effort to retain the historical power of white privilege — now, more important than ever because the nation’s demographics are changing. In the next 25 or so years, more than half of all Americans are predicted to belong to a minority. By 2060, the non-Hispanic white population is projected to fall from 77 percent to a minority 44 percent.

What we are witnessing is nothing less than a plan by the holders of white privilege to retain power. Period. Think South Africa.

This is who we are as a nation. It is important to recognize that.

But we can be different. We can live our lives differently.

We can advocate for a different way to frame the narrative.

And we can vote.