Keep Families Together

Yesterday I wrote a blog post here about my concerns regarding our move from our house to this new experience: a rented high-rise apartment. I wrote about my concern regarding our children: whether, when they came home from their colleges, they would feel at home in this new place: whether it would even feel like home.

It was privilege that allowed me to write that blog post. Privilege to have that as my worry concerning my children, and home. The privilege of a caucasian U.S. citizen.

It was privilege that allowed me to Facetime my child away at her summer camp in a different state. Privilege that allows her to be there. Privilege that allows me to speak to my college-aged daughter on the east coast. Privilege that allows her to be there. Privilege that allowed me to message my stepdaughter in another east coast city at her graduate school. Privilege that allows her to be there. It was privilege that allowed our children to get on planes…and come home.

There are ever so many things, woven into the very fabric of this country, that grant me privilege. I didn’t ask for it. I had no say in who I was born to, my ethnicity or nationality. And yet the privilege was granted: an uncomfortable hair shirt of rights which are supposed to be granted to all, but are not.

With that privilege comes the responsibility to do everything in my power to eradicate it. To fight the very thing that allows me to fight it with impunity.

But even with this bloated, hairy, rotten underbelly of discrimination in our country, I clung to the story I learned seemingly from birth, out of nowhere, from the very air itself: that the United States was open. It might have a stinky underbelly, but at least it had open arms. It gathered in. It allowed entry. At least there, at the moment of request for asylum, it did the right thing.

I realize there is still privilege — U.S. citizen privilege — at play in such a broad hope in that particular story. Increasingly faltering and staggering further and further away from the basic understanding that all of us who joined the Native Americans on this soil are immigrants ourselves, the policies and behaviors enacted on the part of the U.S. government at our borders nonetheless still stood for something approaching openness at its core. One arm had been down for some time, and the other’s reach out toward others was weakening. The embrace of safety had become a weak bro-hug of aloofness. And yet that one hovering open arm: the slight reaching forward in a gathering motion…

In those still-existent gestures of welcome lay hope.

But now: there are the children, stolen from their asylum-seeking parents and caged. These children are not welcomed or encircled with care. They are not even allowed to be hugged or consoled. The arms are not only down. They are not only broken. The open arms of the U.S. are out in front: bent at the elbows, hands curled into fists. Our government has become the attacker. It is the guilty party. It is the one who has crossed the line so egregiously that it is now, in the truest sense of the word, criminal.

It will be a privilege to peel those fingers out of their tightly-balled fists, to bring those arms up away from the sides, to push those arms back open until they are not just wide, but wider still.

Doing the right thing is not a privilege: it is the least we can do. We know what’s right. This administration likes to pretend that wrong is right. They think we will become confused and in so doing, confuse the two as well.

We won’t.