Tom Henihan
Smoky River Express
The U.S. is radically divided along political, economic, social and racial lines and while Donald Trump didn’t create these divisions, like most leaders with totalitarian leanings, he instinctively knows how to broaden the chasm to serve his own agenda.
The U.S. is a becoming an inferno of opposing factions and unfathomable confusion. On the one hand, people cross the U.S./Canada border to escape the draconian, discriminatory policies targeting specific ethnic groups. On the other hand, people put themselves at risk travelling from Central America to find refuge in the U.S. only to have their children taken from them at the U.S./Mexico border and placed in detention centres.
Of all the abominable things Trump has said: the lies, the name calling, the vilifying of minorities, the polarizing speeches that relentlessly promote divisiveness, the moral transgression of taking children from their parents must be his lowest point to date.
The good news is, due to an overwhelming backlash condemning this practice, by Americans of all backgrounds together with religious and social groups and politicians including Republicans, Trump was forced to relent, at least temporarily, and on June 20 halted the separating of children from their parents.
Of course, it is pragmatism not compassion that motivates Trump, who may just be playing for time.
An example of how depraved and callus the current White House administration is, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, while salivating at the pain and distress being inflicted on migrants, cited the bible to defend the practice of taking children from their parents.
“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful,” Sessions said. He also admitted that the policy was instituted to deter migrants from seeking asylum in the U.S.
Laws enacted solely as a deterrent are not laws interested in furthering justice. This is to use the law itself as an instrument of enforcement, not as a measure of justice for having broken the law.
Another ominous personification of the current U.S. Administration is press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, now a year into her role as the debased mouthpiece for Donald Trump. She was asked by a CNN reporter on June 14, as a mother of two small children if she felt compassion for those mothers whose children are taken and incarcerated.
Echoing Sessions, Sanders said to her mind it was “very biblical” moral policy to uphold and enforce the law. Unfortunately, she expressed no solidarity or empathy for the children and mothers being subjected to this barbaric practice.
Only U.S. citizens can directly influence these atrocities and mercifully they did, though their triumph may be fleeting. However, we need to consider the other times agents of the government took children from their mothers, such as Nazi Germany and in Canada the residential schools and the Sixties Scoop to realize how the present U.S. regime is tilting towards that same menacing abyss.