We call ourselves the land of the free and the home of the brave, a nation of laws, not capriciously ruled by fallible human beings. But then we see another child torn from their parents because of the policies of ill-intentioned bureaucrats and it hits so many of us right in the stomach.
Many of us are watching the country stubbornly resist living up to the soaring idealism of our national story.
But the problem is, this isn’t the first time in our history that a bunch of powerful men got to decide whose kids to separate from their parents. We have a fairly long history in this country of breaking up families that don’t meet with our approval, who don’t seem “American” enough.
It’s too easy to say we didn’t see it coming (though it is worth asking why we didn’t). The shame of it is that there’ve been a lot of people who did see it coming and have been trying to tell us for a long time that we have a giant bug programmed into the operating software.
Black and Brown neighbors. LGBTQIA+ siblings. Native inhabitant. Immigrant families. Our disabled friends. Unfortunately, they have an intimate knowledge of how power in this country works. They know how the risks begin to stack up disproportionately for those who can check the fewest number of boxes: __White, __Male, __Heterosexual, __Cisgender, __Nondisabled.
They know. They’ve known forever.
We’ve treated the people trying to tell us what we were capable of as though they were cultural Cassandras, describing a country we didn’t recognize and so just assumed they were exaggerating.
But they weren’t, as it turns out. As difficult as it is to admit to ourselves, they were describing the leitmotif of this country’s national symphony.
Maybe what we should be doing now is sitting down and apologizing. Then maybe we revisit what our neighbors have been telling us. And maybe we believe them without demanding proof that satisfies our skepticism. And then, if we mean what we say in our founding documents, maybe we let what we learn change how we respond the next time people in masks start tearing crying children from the arms of their families.
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