Reliving Terror
By Rowan Wolf
UNCOMMON THOUGHT
"Like many kids from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds, I did not see the police as my friend. In fact, they were to be feared and avoided. Unfortunately, I could not avoid them. They took me on a journey to find my Mother. They took me to their car and put me in the back seat, and started driving from one bar to the next..."
I got up and went to stand at one of the windows. I looked out through the wire at the lightning lit sky and cried for what seemed a long time. I then went back to my cot, crawled in and slept in exhaustion. We were woken the next morning, and they brought me some clothes and told me to get dressed. When everyone was dressed we lined up and they marched us from the dormitory to a cafeteria for breakfast. It seems like breakfast was some oatmeal and a glass of milk. They had us line up and take our bowls and glasses and place them on a table. Then they marched us out and dropped a bunch of us off in “play rooms”. There were about 20 of us in each room. There wasn’t much there. They had windows on the hall side and they locked the door behind us. There were classrooms with desks and a blackboard. They too had big windows with wire fencing, and we were locked in. We were generally moved as a group from one space to the next and locked in wherever we went. They took us out to the “playground” that had no play equipment that I can remember. It was asphalt with a huge concrete wall around it. You could only see straight up.
Older girls were kept in smaller rooms with multiple bunk beds. I believe there were six girls to a room and they had them doing laundry and ironing clothes and bedding. I don’t know where the boys were, but I assume somewhere in the same facility. Maybe a different floor.
I asked over and over to see my mother and was told that I couldn’t see her. I asked where she was; how long I was to be there; how I could go home; whether I could see my aunt, my friend (Tom) or Tom’s parents. No, and no, and no.
Then one day they put me in a dress and I went to court. My mother was there (but they wouldn’t let me go to her), and my aunt was there (but I couldn’t go to her either). They sat me down at this big table with the judge and a bunch of stuff went on that made no sense to me. The judge finally asked me who I wanted to live with, and I said I wanted to live with my mother. He said OK, and asked somebody to remove me. I was crying. My mom asked the judge if she could speak to me just for a minute, and he said yes. I ran to my mom and she gave me a big hug and then looked me in the eye and said that she loved me, but that I would never see her again. She told me to never forget what she had taught me and to always do what I thought was the right thing to do even if no one else agreed with me. She was crying, and I was crying and she kissed me and the judge told the person to take me. As I was leaving, the judge gave me a piece of candy. I was taken to one of the playrooms and locked in with the rest of the kids. I looked at the piece of candy in my hand and I threw it as hard as I could at one of the big windows with the heavy fencing between me and the sky.
I believe I spent about six months in the detention center before they sent me out to my first foster family. They let me talk to my “aunt” periodically on the phone. Once I was in foster care, the court or the social worker decided that I was not making a good transition and they decided to no longer allow me to call my aunt. She was my final connection to my life and my mother. I was then totally alone and adrift in an overburdened and inhuman system.
I have had health problems my entire life, and had bleeding ulcers by the time I was 10. I now have a double-lung transplant and a laundry list of chronic health problems. I have struggled with all kinds of issues with forming relationships, as I have had to work my way through trust, vulnerability, and abandonment issues.
I am not alone in my experiences. There are millions upon millions of us, and probably billions on a global level. And we watch the evolving disaster being created by Trump and his racist, nationalist minions, reliving the terror of our childhoods (and parents their terrors), and it sounds almost trite to call this Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Why? Because while it is innately personal it is also innately collective and the consequences cross the generations.
I watch, and the millions of stolen children watch and Trump and his “advisors” create cruel policies that block refugees, and those fleeing horrors at home, from finding safety in our land. He claims they are some massive threat to us, but clearly this is not so. He initiates a “zero tolerance” policy on the border and then essentially forces asylum seekers to cross “illegally” into the United States where they go looking for the Border Patrol to turn themselves in. The Trump/Sessions diabolic “policy” entails arresting asylum seekers and convicting them BEFORE determining whether they have a legitimate asylum claim. The adults are then put in federal jurisdiction, fast tracked for deportation. Meanwhile, their children are taken from them and put into state (federal) custody. They are moved into a totally different system.
There was no preparation. Deliberately? And children are going into ad hoc “detention” facilities while their parents are going into federal prisons while they wait to see if they will be approved for asylum, or sent for rapid deportation. There is NO plan to reunite these children with their parents. These children have been cruelly, and deliberately, STOLEN.
Now Trump says that he is prioritizing keeping families together (if the courts allow), but maintaining a “zero tolerance” policy. There is good reason to think that this executive order is a waste of paper, and only a show to shut down the outrage against his policies. Why? Because they can’t detain children endlessly – even with their families – and zero tolerance will continue to overwhelm the system. Children will continue to be stolen by the US government and lost in the bowels of facilities under multiple jurisdictions across the country. All of this is supposedly meant to act as a “deterrent” to keep refugees from our borders. In other words, to send the message that coming to the United States is more dangerous than killer gangs and deadly violence in their home countries.
So people will run from the danger on their heels, but they will head deeper into the desert; following the most dangerous routes, to enter into this land of possible safety. As they do this more refugees, and the children in their arms will die – in the deserts, locked in the backs of freight trucks; trapped in cargo containers baking in the heat of 105 degree sun.
And the millions of us who have had a small taste of the cruelties of these systems will watch and the our nightmares will join the nightmares of the parents and children cruelly trapped in a no win situation of one of the cruelest administrations on the planet. Welcome to the New Untied States.
This is a policy deliberate in its cruelty to whip a “base” to hate these created “others” who it is claimed are coming to “infest” the United States. It is a deliberately cruel policy where the horror is being used to push through two other policy goals – to build an expensive and dangerous wall, and to recraft immigration into the United States to effectively ban the “brown” people from crossing into the United States. It is a deliberately expensive policy to throw hundreds of millions of dollars into the private “corrections” industry and to undermine the system of justice via mass trials and not allowing the victims of the policy legal representation – or even advice – thereby creating an entire class of people who are denied due justice rights. If that does not scare you, it certainly should.
And we watch, and cry, and rage, and yes I hope rise up and stop these actions that are anathema to any level of human rights.
I am a sociologist, writer and activist with life long engagement in social justice, peace, environmental, and animal rights movements. My research and writing includes issues of imperialism, oppression, global capitalism, peak resources, global warming, and environmental degradation. I taught sociology for twenty-two years, was a member of the City of Portland’s Peak Oil Task Force, and maintain my own site Uncommon Thought Journal. I may be reached by email at rowan@uncommonthought.com. On a personal note, I am also a survivor of pulmonary hypertension by the gift of a donor’s lungs in 2011. I do my best to honor that gift by trying to be my best self and give to the world what small gifts I have. Among of those is a deep passion for life, and the lives of all those with whom I share the planet.
Rowan is a former managing editor of The Greanville Post, and editor in chief of Cyrano's Journal.
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report