A Dream Ending
This summer, during our annual trip on NJ’s official tall ship the A.J Meerwald, we passed the Statue of Liberty at sunset. This year, I thought I saw her weeping. As the beautiful day drew to a close behind her amazing silhouette, it seemed that the day of welcoming those huddled masses was also drawing to a close as well.
The way the child refugees crossing the border into the United States are being treated by people claiming to love America is a travesty. We can’t possibly survive as a nation or even a species when we so cavalierly disregard children, no matter where they come from. This year news all over the world has been of a madness taking hold.
Heartbreak Around the Globe
Extremists in Pakistan shooting girls because they want to attend school. Extremists kidnapping hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria, for the same reason. Russian separatists shooting down planes and even after realizing that children had been on board, allowing their tiny bodies to lay unclaimed in a sunflower field next to their burned and broken toys that fell with them from the sky.
The Syrian government indiscriminately bombing cities with thousands of children, at the same time, extremists in Syria and Iraq, killing and kidnapping children in the name of religion. Militants in Gaza shooting missiles at cities with innocent children in them. Israel, bombing entire apartment buildings and schools in Gaza with children in them, in the name of what exactly?
Have we become so heartless as a species and so bent on our own demise that we cannot spare one second to consider how our actions harm children?
America’s Role
In America, we think that stuff happens “over there”. We are the good folks who adopt or sponsor children from far away. We feel sorry for refugees on the other side of the planet, but when we actually see children cross our borders escaping the terror of deadly gangs in South America created because of the demand for illegal drugs from the US, we try to close our borders and our hearts.
As I passed in front of the statue of Liberty that beautiful peaceful night, I teared up thinking about how my great grandfather 111 years ago floated into New York Harbor and saw the Statue before being welcomed at Ellis Island. And now, so many Americans, perhaps because they are so far from this great lady, forget she is still there protecting New York Harbor with her light. Most Americans don’t even realize that at her feet are chains broken to represent the end of slavery. At the same time, we are seeing an increase in human trafficking. Some of the victims are here in the United States, still hidden. Women and children.
Why Politics Matters
The discussions I hear lately from Washington DC are of grown men – some with families of their own - who barely contain their glee at defunding the Food Stamp program. Closer to home, I have even listened to a woman sitting at dinner in a million dollar home over a meal that was cooked for her (for free) by her generous mother and served on a marble table, complaining about how some children at her daughter’s school don’t look poor enough to need the school lunches they get. Yes, that happened. The ugliness is catching.
My father until recently ran the local food pantry at his church, and he regularly cooks for homeless families who take turns sleeping at different churches in the area. Families. With children. We are not doing a very good job if there are so many in need, especially children. My father used to fret endlessly about having enough to give these families. The only time I have ever seen him cry was when talking about the pantry. He could not understand why government aid had been cut.
A few years ago, I recorded a song my cousin wrote called “The Little Birds” about two homeless girls. It strikes a chord because most people think about animals with more compassion than we view other human beings in distress. I still can barely sing it without crying. I thought a lot about that song this year, watching the flood of homeless children crossing our borders while people who call themselves “patriots” but who forget what the idea of America stands for, shouted in their tiny faces to go home. But to what?
Americans
What has happened to us when we cannot scrape up enough compassion to treat a child refugee with kindness, or offer a hungry child a meal? The way some people who call themselves Americans are behaving these days is downright un-American. We forget that even the very first Americans, the Lenape, welcomed the Dutch here because they believed that the earth belonged to everyone and no one. They believed there was enough for all.
Lady Liberty
Now, when the world needs a shining example, it shouldn’t just be a statue. It should be us, standing here with outstretched hands and open hearts. That is what America should mean.
But today, Lady Liberty weeps.
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