Summer freedoms

When I was a kid, summer was a struggle. We lived in a hot-summer climate, and I inherited my father’s inability to tolerate heat well. I’d feel a little sick on every hot day, and spend as much time indoors as I could - usually reading. I also missed the structure of school, and the rewards of completing assignments, homework, projects. In summer back then you were supposed to be tan, athletic, outdoorsy, and social, and I was none of those things.

But I did (and still do) resonate to the notion of summer as holding more freedom. Time to explore and wander, take advantage of longer days and warmer evenings. “School’s out” was code for less supervision and more self-direction. Since I’ve made a career in academia, I still live that rhythm of the school year’s hustle and bustle, and summer’s slower pace.

Here in our community, school is now out. College students head back home or off to summer jobs and internships, emptying the town. Younger kids take over the parks and streets on bicycles and scooters, celebrating and lamenting “nothing to do.”

But all across our country, there are hundreds of children starting this summer in detention camps. Their parents were rounded up and thrown into detention for supposed immigration violations. These children are not lawbreakers and in many cases are U.S. citizens themselves. They are eating rotten food, living in squalor, and facing disease, while their parents await access to some sort of justice system.

This week marks the celebration of our country’s determination to end human enslavement as an economic system. We were one of the last countries to do so, and Juneteenth is a powerful symbol of how freeing any of us frees all of us.

We must free the children who are incarcerated and suffering. No morally upright society incarcerates children as a political strategy. We truly honor the spirit of Juneteenth, and the spirit of summer, only by continuing to work for freedom for all.

Allowing children to live in the desperate conditions at Dilley, or deporting them from detention with nothing but the clothes they were wearing when incarcerated, is about as far from what a “great” country would do as we can possibly imagine. (See source after the photo.)

Great countries care for children, protect them, and help them thrive, in summers and year-round. Today, as this post is published, we recognize the contributions of fathers and father-figures. All loving fathers want the best for their children; how can we honor fathering while putting children in jail?

Working for greatness means working for the children.

Be safe and well, and take good care.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/04/06/ice-kids-detention-over-6200-trump