The title alone grabs your attention. But the op-ed itself is even more pointed.
Consider: after providing some introductory material, Blow goes into the case of Marco Antonio Muñoz, the 39-year-old Honduran who when told he was being separated from his wife and 3 year old son and lost it,….
after describing in detail what happened to Muñoz, including what finally happened to him after he was put in a padded cell:
Muñoz would take his own life. A guard saw “ ‘a piece of clothing twisted around his neck which was tied to the drainage location in the center of the cell,’ according to the incident report filed by the sheriff’s department that morning.”
Blow offers these words:
I can’t begin to imagine the incredible pain and anxiety parents like Muñoz and their children must feel. I can’t imagine being forcibly separated from my children for any reason.
And yet, this has become Trump’s policy of persecution. Attorney General Jeff Sessions even had the gall to invoke one of the same Bible verses used to justify slavery to justify the current policy.
Here let me make a discursus. I’m sorry, but I do not accept the notion of following leaders unreservedly, or being required to follow laws that are clearly unjust. I can imagine that for Jeff Sessions this is in a sense his final revenge for being denied a Federal judge position for being a racist in prosecuting civil rights workers on bogus charges. But I remember the nobility of King protesting unjust laws, of the children of Birmingham filling the jails. I know enough of our history to know that Levi Coffin broke the law by maintaining a stop on the Underground Railroad, that Harriet Tubman clearly broke the law by helping slaves from Dorchester County escape, and that our Founders who declared independence and fought the soldiers of the King were clearly breaking British law.
Even more, at a time when Michael Hayden tweets an image of the entrance to a concentration camp, where people remind us of the Nazis separating parents and children, that those like the Giep family hiding Otto Frank and his family in Amsterdam were breaking the law, disobeying the “government.” Gandhi started by breaking the pass laws in South Africa. The Lovings broke the law by living in Virginia. Laws are often wrong, and honest people challenge them, risking liberty and life in doing so. And some governments are evil, as unfortunately ours is proving to be.
Further, when I saw the now viral photograph of the little girl in red crying, my mind went back to one of the more powerful images from”Schindler’s List.” Schindler and his mistress are on horses on a hilltop watching the rounding up of the Jews below. All of the film except the end is in black and white — except in this scene we see a little girl dressed in red. Later we see her body. For me that connection between the film and this photo was visceral.
But you did not come here to read me, but to see what I have to say about Blow’s writing, which you should read.
Much of his column is quoting from NY Times editorial writers.
But Blow himself can be quite pointed:
Trump is lying, as he often does. This barbaric policy is an outgrowth of his own personal cruelty. It’s absolutely reprehensible and an absolute reflection of him.
Here think of Trump still arguing that the Central Park Five should have been executed even after they were exonerated by DNA evidence.
Blow also quote from a statement by the President of the American Psychological Association, one that bluntly lays out the horrendous impact of this policy, a statement from which I quote only this:
The administration’s policy of separating children from their families as they attempt to cross into the United States without documentation is not only needless and cruel, it threatens the mental and physical health of both the children and their caregivers.
Read the entire piece. When you do, you will get to the two final paragraphs, words with which I will end this post:
I don’t have a long treatise to issue here, no meandering argument. I am simply outraged beyond my ability to articulate it.
This practice of family separation must end, and Trump and every other politician who was silent about it or worse, endorsed it, must be held to account at the ballot box.