Cruel, But Not Unusual

The practice of separating children from their parents is cruel; there simply is no other word for it.  It occupies the same moral domain as torture and slavery.  It reveals utter disregard for, or even enjoyment of, the suffering of others.  And it warps the soul of the perpetrator, as well as the victim.

     The practice of separating children from their parents was commonly used by European settlers in the United States and Australia to destroy the cultures of the indigenous peoples.  Russia has used this particular from of state terror against homosexuals.  Indeed, heartless people have used this tactic to abuse and oppress and destroy in countless times and places.

     Now this practice is again (or, perhaps, still) the official policy of the US government.  Children who enter the country with their parents illegally are taken from their parents and delivered into the care of the Department of Health and Human Services.  From there they are placed with relatives already in the country or, if there are no relatives, with foster parents.  So at least the children are being cared for, or so it seems.

     But now we learn that HHS has lost track of almost 1500 children who arrived at the border unaccompanied by any adult and were placed in foster care.  The ACLU reports that many of these children are subjected to physical and sexual abuse, and denied adequate food and water by agents of Customs and Border Protection.  Worse, it appears that some of these children, as well as thousands of other unaccompanied minors who have entered the country since 2013, may have been delivered directly into the hands of pedophiles and human traffickers.  Why, then, should we trust the government to do any better with the children whom they forcibly take from their parents?

     Jeff Sessions, head of the DOJ, and other government officials, emphasize the fact that the children who are being separated from their parents are being brought into the country illegally.  This is usually true, but it does not speak to the issue of cruelty.  Nor does it speak to the fact that many of these immigrants are fleeing poverty and violence for which the US bears considerable responsibility.  We have supported vicious dictators in virtually every country of Central and South America, tyrants who brutalized and impoverished their people.  Tyrants who destroyed the political and social institutions of their countries, while allowing the US to pillage their resources.  The wave of immigrants at our border is part of the price we pay for these decades of abuse.

    Perhaps we should not be surprised at this cruelty.  After all, the US government embraced torture after 9/11.  The spectacle of a Vice-President, the appropriately named Dick Cheney, publicly advocating torture is a stain from which the honor of the United States will not soon be cleansed.  (Given Congress’s recent approval of one of the central figures in the torture program as head of the CIA, it is not clear that anyone in government wants to cleanse this stain.)  Advocates of torture portray it as a legitimate tool to extract information from terrorists, information that will save American lives.  But this is highly doubtful.  The real purpose of torture, and of practices like separating parents from their children, is terror and coercion:  cross us and we will give your children to pedophiles, or waterboard you until you break, or string you up by the testicles with piano wire, or….  Once you start down this path, it is difficult to know where to stop.

     It’s not clear that the US has any notion of stopping.  It seems that our laws and policies and social practices, concerning both ourselves and others, are becoming more cruel by the day.  Often, cruelty springs from fear so great that it justifies anything that will keep the terror at bay.  The United States is a pretty fearful place right now.