I have three kids. One of them is a daughter (not that I like daughters more than sons, they’re all great, but that it’s relevant today). This is Skatje when she was a child:
Now she has a daughter. This is Iliana.
It’s a video. Go ahead, watch it. It’ll melt your heart. I check Skatje’s Instagram every morning, because nothing will cheer me up more than seeing that happy little baby. Well, maybe seeing my happy little grandson is just as heartwarming, but they’re not in competition.
Little kids are all wonderful. There’s a great big emotional trigger in those faces, and it makes me want to hug them and protect them and make the world safe for them.
You know, like a dad.
So I turn to the news today, and there’s The Picture. I’m not going to show it here, because it breaks my heart. It’s the photo of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, Valeria, drowned and dead on the banks of the Rio Grande. I can scarcely bear it.
“They wanted a better future for their girl,” María Estela Ávalos, Vanessa’s mother, told The Washington Post.
Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, Tania Vanessa Ávalos and their daughter, Valeria, on Valeria’s first birthday.
They traveled more than 1,000 miles seeking it. Once in the United States, they planned to ask for asylum, for refuge from the violence that drives many Central American migrants from their home countries every day. But the farthest the family got was an international bridge in Matamoros, Mexico. On Sunday, they were told the bridge was closed and that they should return Monday. Aid workers told The Post the line to get across the bridge was hundreds long.
The young family was desperate. Standing on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, America looked within reach. Martínez and Valeria waded in. But before they all made it to the other side, to Brownsville, Tex., the river waters pulled the 25-year-old and his daughter under and swept them away.
As a father, I see this story, and I think — let them in. Let them all in. Tear down the walls and gates and blockades and embrace these people as fellow human beings in need of help. We have an obligation to everyone that is compromised by selfishness and greed and an evil hatred of others, and if we were a humane and great good state, we would be working to help, not harm.
Instead, we exploit our neighbors and when they flee the conditions we have created, we bar the door and watch them die. We watch children drown. The ones who make it across are thrown into concentration camps, and parents and children are separated, and kept in inhumane conditions.
We are the bad guys here. Not just slightly bad, either: history is going to look back on us and call us monsters. We kill baby girls and the fathers trying to protect them.
Then we get into debates about the meanings of words, and parse out the laws in our books, and reinterpret our history, all to justify cruelty and our privileges and dehumanize desperate people. There are people on the internet right now trying to claim that that family deserved it. There are politicians who are thinking are laws are not cruel enough.
The bodies of the dead lining our border tell us, though, that we are wrong. We are an evil empire that builds prisons to control people, and maintains armies and guards to make them fear. That is not hyperbole. The corpses of children tell us it’s an understatement.
I’ll just watch Iliana some more, and hope she is better treated than other baby girls…but they all deserve better than we give them.
I feel your anger and sadness. I don’t have children and it rips me up to see what happened. I am for letting anyone in that can get to the border. We owe it as the most advanced and richest country in the world. I have been poorer then anyone else I have ever met in the USA (homeless for years with my family) and yet we still are far better then many many many countries.
let them in, they fought hard to get here, they obviously want to be part of us more than most of our own sheeple.
He got across with his daughter and went back for his wife, and his daughter tried to follow him.
I can’t look at pictures of those kids without thinking of my daughter at their age. What the hell is wrong with the wiring in Republican hearts that they can see a thing like this and their first thoughts are only excuses and blamecasting? How do they shut off the human part and still walk around?
I remember feeling this way, at least in the abstract because I didn’t have kids, in 1991 when we were blocking Haitian refugees fleeing in boats. “Serious” people, including liberals like the late Daniel Schorr speaking on NPR, behaved as if this was completely just and understandable. To make it worse, Clinton continued the “policy” at least at the beginning of his term.
Of course, we’re the bad guys. Of course, the many benefits I accrue as a US citizen have been paid for in blood and bondage, historically and continuing into the present day. Sometimes I forget it, usually at times when on the surface it’s not as blatant as then or today, but I really despair of changing it.
This is not to deny the importance of closing Trump’s concentration camps immediately, but the US will never be the “good guys.” I doubt any nation state can be.
I can understand your feelings. On my second visit to Malaysia I helped bury a stillborn child. Her parents were refugees fleeing one of the regular pogroms carried out against Rohingya Muslims by Myanmar Buddhists. The mother had gone into premature labour after the ordeal of crossing into Malaysia and her baby didn’t survive. The parents were too fearful of being sent back to their would-be murderers to stay around and it was left to the kindness of strangers to bury their child.
My own country, Australia has a similar reputation for criminally vicious treatment of refugees. The latest bilious vomit from our Monster for Homeland security , (nicknamed il-Duce) is the vile claim that women refugees who are raped by the private security guards supposedly protecting them are actually getting pregnant so they can escape from his Pacific Island torture camps and be brought to Australia for an abortion and access to proper legal representation. His boss our happy-clappy Pentecostal Prime Monster is also considering marching lockstep into Iran with his saviour Trump. The civilised world is any thing but.
For the last couple days, I’ve forced myself to read story after story about this mess. I’ve even made the mistake of perusing the comments section where there are usually tiny number of people of good will implore this greedy, racist, superstitious shithole country to scrape together what little empathy that’s left and do something about frightened, abused, children who were stolen from their families and left to languish in cages.
Want to know what I heard in reply? “They’re illegal aliens. This is what they deserve for coming into our country without our approval.” This horror show is going to get much, much worse and with the enthusiastic permission of the American people.
Between this and all the other social, cultural, and economic evil that going on right now, I’ve entirely lost all hope. I want the world to end. Even if we somehow put a Democrat in the White House with a regain control of the Congress, these animals (No lectures about “othering” or “dehumanizing” right-wingers, please. I don’t fucking care anymore.) will still be with us and they’ll be angrier than ever. Unless a hypothetical liberal government is willing to use legal and military power stomp out these scum once and for all they will cause trouble. However, America’s sad, laughable excuse for a Left wing never willing (e.g. “I like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony…”) so the scum WILL cause trouble until they’re back in power.
@Akira MacKenzie “Between this and all the other social, cultural, and economic evil that going on right now, I’ve entirely lost all hope.”
I’m with you on this. I don’t actually want the world to end, but I’m starting to feel a lot less stake in its continued existence. Maybe somebody else in the universe has gotten things to work. We sure seem to be off to a poor start here.
Getting Trump out of the White House will be a small easing of pain for me, but it won’t solve the real problem. There are many Americans who love him. They were never expecting him to do anything to make their lives better, and many Trumpies were doing fine anyway. If anything, they are willing to accept having things a little worse for them as long as they’re a lot worse for the “undeserving” of various categories (especially “illegal” aliens right now). I knew there were people like this, but until Trump was elected, I was fooling myself about how many.
Meanwhile, the world is going to hell anyway, so you might get your wish, though I suspect that the effects of global warming will not actually wipe out humanity, but only exacerbate inequality between the very rich and everyone else.
Akira MacKenzie @#5
No worries, the world ending is actually quite likely to happen within the next century once there is enough CO2 in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the civilization as we know it ending will only make things worse and more unfair for those who are already underprivileged.
By the way, I have also lost all hope. I deal with this hopelessness by reminding myself that I’ll die soon enough and then it won’t be my problem anymore.
QFFT. Toddlers are literally dying in their own dirt on concrete floors. Anyone insisting on telling us how much worse extermination camps were, can gently go fuck themselves with a thermal lance.
They are not refugees because they want to leave their homes. They are refugees because living where they come from is too dangerous. I would not be surprised to learn that the father was threatened to join the gangs or be killed…this happens far too often. But even barring that, the level of violent oppression in the region is difficult to comprehend.
This violence is a direct result of American greed and our government’s complicity in supporting regimes set up to control workers in the interest of corporate profits. This has been going on for 150 years at least. There are far more bodies there as a result of this violence than on the US border.
I find it particularly heartbreaking to look at the picture above knowing that the young woman with the gentle smile is somewhere right now suffering an unimaginable grief and pain that she will never fully recover from.
Akira MacKenzie@5,
My wife has a cheery thought. She’s hoping climate change kills off all the humans before we render the planet uninhabitable for the rest of the living things that occupy it (in ever decreasing numbers) with us. I’ve always said she’s an optimist.
The thing is that the end of the world won’t be pretty–and it won’t even be the end. There really isn’t a limit to how bad things can get if we let them. Despair isn’t adaptive. The only choice is to push in the right directions. If you stop, that’s one less person pushing against evil.
“As a father, I see this story, and I think — let them in. Let them all in.”
Independent of parental status, as a human, I agree.
No matter what, you can count on one thing: Americans will think the world revolves around them and the rest of the planet should just trot along, in good or in bad.
Dunno in the US, in Italy they even stopped that.
People openly saying “They can all die, I’ll be happier if they do, I don’t give a fuck” has become common.
People openly, self-righteously asserting the right to be uncaring assholes.
They don’t even pretend any more, they don’t have to.
I simply despise humanity.
I don’t know what else to do.
In much of the world, history already calls you monsters, and for things much, much worse than this. We just know we have to smile and make nice with you because we’ve seen what happens to those who don’t.
In the grand scheme of things, this probably doesn’t make the top five, maybe the top ten, on the list of reasons why the USA should be a pariah nation.
The terrifying thing is, that the moderate democratic position seems to be “slightly nicer concentration camps” and “if a child dies, call me; maybe”.
I fear the picture of the drowned father and daughter will have the same effect on the consciences of American racists, xenophobes and authoritarians as the picture of Alan Kurdi (remember him?) had on the consciences of European racists, xenophobes and authoritarians. That is, the arseholes all went out and enthusiastically voted for the likes of Orban and Salvini. We have more border controls, more fences, more detention camps, more people dying at our southern borders than ever before. These people have utterly failed as human beings, and they have also failed to understand that the wall that keeps them OUT keeps you IN.
This is just a slow motion Voyage of the Damned, an endless fleet of them. We’ll only come to terms with it, collectively call it what it is, when the perpetrators and collaborators are dead and buried and therefore immune to the punishment they deserve. More will die so that they may preserve their reputations and their heads, and we will call it just and say Never Again all over again.