Shadowy images of white kerchiefs remerge in crisp white paint on plaza cobblestones. Aging, faded photos reappear on walls. Families, gather, holding one another in tears and prayer. Their bright yellow balloons yellow ribbons are a jarring disconnect between light and the darkest acts committed by men.
On August 30 each year, another day in memory of The Disappeared is endured in Argentina. Two generations on, the unspeakable anguish lingers for families of the 30,000 who went missing in that country’s dirty war, a war aided and abetted by the United States.
How much air is there now between that brutal regime and the current administration? An administration that stoops to ripping children from their parents’ arms and incarcerating them is closer to dictatorship than democracy.
The apologists will say “But the children aren't actually being killed.” Prove it. Prove that each and every child taken is still alive. And prove that the Trump and his accessories will not kill many of them in slow motion. They have sentenced them to a life of mental, emotional and even physical illness.
The science is proven. Neuroscientists and physics know the wretched lasting results of childhood trauma. A partial list of welcome gifts America has given to these most vulnerable? Crippling anxiety. Inability to trust. Incapacity to bond. Lost cognitive skills. Magnified risk of diabetes and heart disease. Increased use of substance abuse.
As for the parents, the Trump policy is cruel beyond measure. In the failed states parents fled, disappeared means dead. And if they can get past the soul searing thought of their child’s death, what are the odds of reunion? In the United State’s new “Papers Please” society, those without papers cease to exist. For these children, stripped of every possession by their jailers, a note in a pocket or a phone number on a scrap of paper is their only proof of personhood. No birth or baptism certificate? No passport? The child becomes a stateless nonentity to be managed by the bureaucracy.
Lost, traumatized children. Broken parents. This is what the nation’s lurch to the right has produced.
Who will cover the pavement in US cities with images of kerchiefs bearing the names of immigrant children seized from their parents’ arms and disappeared by the Trump administration?
It’s time for us to trade pink hats for white kerchiefs. Time to throw sand in the gears of a government driving America closer to the fascism and racism of brutal dictatorships.