3 Alarm Fire!
In the house !!!
NOW!
Yes! Our House! Our Country!
I taught basic American history to 4th and 5th graders for a decade. I was pretty good at it — I won our state’s Newsweek Social Studies Teacher of the Year award even before I became a full-time high school history teacher. Even so, I consider myself more a student of history than a teacher. Would that we all were; students of history, that is. Maybe we would learn.
I study, investigate, seek to understand, explain, and learn from what has happened in the past. Not just on the surface, but in the corners, under the layers, in the shadows.
Parallels are easy to find if you’re looking. They are easy to miss if you’re in denial. But in the history of mankind, in the history of nations, in the history of America, there are few things that portend tragedy and destruction as clearly as government ordered separation of families.
Perhaps a few photos will help jar the memories of folks who don’t recall those previous times in our nation’s short history where we saw such horror inflicted on innocent men, women and children.
Slavery: From our nation’s inception to its most critical precipice — The Civil War — the separation of black families was built in and promised destruction. I am tempted to add a photo here of black children visiting black parents in prison to reflect how America has continued this tradition, but the truth is the current separation is not about visitation, which is relatively rare. It’s about trauma. It’s about absence. It’s about families being torn apart.
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Native Americans: The traumatic separation of Native American families began early in our nation’s history and has continued into the modern era. Boarding-schools began soon after the Civil War, while America was still “at war” with many tribes. These abusive, isolating residential schools were designed to “assimilate” Native children. As this practice gave way under scrutiny and social pressure in the mid 20th century, a lesser known but equally painful and isolating “adoption era” took root in the 1960s and 70s:
During the adoption era almost any issue—from minor to serious—could precipitate the loss of an Indian child. Two Native people interviewed prior to the summit said they were separated from their families after hospital stays as young children, one for a rash, the other for tuberculosis. A third was seized at his baby-sitter’s home; when his mother tried to rescue him, she was jailed, he said. A fourth recalled that he was taken after his father died, though his mother did not want to give him up. A fifth described being snatched, along with siblings, because his grandfather was a medicine man who wouldn’t give up his traditional ways.
indiancountrymedianetwork.com/...
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WWII and The Holocaust I doubt many of us need much reminding about the separation of families that occurred during the horrific slaughter and depravation of Nazi labor camps. “Over one million children under the age of sixteen died in the Holocaust - plucked from their homes and stripped of their childhoods, they lived and died during the dark years of the Holocaust and were victims of the Nazi regime.” That wasn’t even 75 years ago. And no, it didn’t happen here, but it happened on our watch. While we were a “super power.” We were hailed as heroes for helping to liberate those that were found alive afterwards, and we judged the responsible country and its evil leader very harshly.
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Vocabulary
bondage slave trade auction block captive emancipation whip rebellion property
genocide isolation assimilate institution forced prejudice boarding school
deportation persecution arrest internment concentration camps gas chamber
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I don’t know about any other history teachers, but I know I have had alarm bells going off in my head for the last year. They have been getting louder and louder until I can barely hear. But I can still think.
NOW:
Washington (CNN)The Trump administration has decided to refer every person caught crossing the border illegally for federal prosecution, a policy that could result in the separation of far more parents from their children at the border.
www.cnn.com/...May 7, 2018
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Tuesday defended an agency policy that will result in more families being separated at the border, saying, under a barrage of questions at a Senate hearing, that similar separations happen in the US "every day."
and on a slightly different but still unbelievable note...
The Trump administration last month testified it lost track of 20% -- or nearly 1,500 children -- of the undocumented minors that had been in its custody over a three-month period at the end of 2017.
www.cnn.com/...May 15, 2018
1,500 children? Lost track of? Many excellent diaries have been written here at Daily Kos about this unbelievable travesty of justice.
Besides these (and other) informative articles, Gabe Ortiz has been persistantly chronicling such abuses here on DK for the last year. “HHS officials say they can’t find 1,5000 migrant kids they placed with U.S. sponsors” and today “Trump tries to blame Democrats for his policy tearing kids from immigrant parents at the border.” They have been many and horrific.
One more line of vocabulary for continuity:
Indian Wars Mexican War Civil War Spanish-American War World War II
Sorry, just one more.
Trauma Kidnapping Humanity
I study, investigate, seek to understand, explain, and learn from what has happened in the past. Not just on the surface, but in the corners, under the layers, in the shadows.
In the cracks and crevices of seemingly solid structures, where moisture seeps and freezes and expands, cracking and slowly eroding what had seemed indestructible. Like nations. Like governments. Like families.
Final Quiz: Are you smarter than a 5th grader?
1. Considering the past and the present regarding government ordered separation of families what might we expect to come next for our nation?
2. Considering the past and the present, has America lived up to her ideals as a nation?
3. Considering the past and the present, has America lived up to her practices as a nation?
4. Considering the past and the present when it comes to government ordered separation of families is there cause for concern? Is there cause for alarm?
5. What are you willing to do?