LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Let's vote all of them out now

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To the editor:

In a nightmare scenario, you run in fear from danger, your child is in your arms. You reach safety. You have assumed the safe place is guarded by humane people.

But these “humane” people take your crying child from you. They separate mother and child. You wander about from place to place uncertain as to your own safety. Those in power do not allow you to see your child. Your life is a new nightmare.

What country, what power, takes a child from its mother?

There is religious text that tells us not to take a baby bird from its nest if the mother bird is present. Kind people wait until a puppy has suckled before they take it from its mother.

Where is decency, pity, kindness and humanity when people are treated thus-worse than animals? What has happened in the United States of America?

Trump happened.

As sad as it is that as a country we once had detention facilities that housed families, now it is all unclear. Now we do not allow families to be detained together. Or do we? What is the policy?

Trump prefers to separate the children. Homeland Security denies that there is a new policy that keeps children from their mothers. But if there is no new policy, how and why have 700 children been separate from their mothers?

What the hell has happened to us?

Trump happened. And Congress became mute. Mute as in silent. Mute as in useless. Mute as in complicit.

See the front page of The New York Times on April 21. Call your congress person. Call your senators. 

Call Martha McSally, chair of the subcommittee that oversees border issues. After a call to her office, I was told that staff people do not know where Congresswoman McSally stands on this issue.

OK. This is not Nazi Germany. But imagine for a few moments that you are the mother. You are the father. 

You are the crying child that yearns for his or her mother. Now tell yourself what country you are in.

OK. It is not Nazi Germany, but it is also not the United States that I pledge allegiance to. It is not the United States that bends toward justice. It is someone’s nightmare, and if it’s someone’s nightmare, than it’s our nightmare as well.

Vote them out.

Deborah Schiavo

Deborah Schiavo

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