They're Getting Kool-Aid™ Jammers and Animated Movies*

Children do not belong in detention centers. "Detention centers" appears to be a more acceptable term than "concentration camps." Families belong together. This is now a popular trending hashtag. So is Close the Camps Now. Last night I attended a vigil downtown at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center, where over 1000 men are being held. We gathered outside the facility with 4000 people, just over the 10 freeway. Some people brought Mylar blankets as a sign of solidarity, fashioning brilliant flags and scarves out of them. The incarcerated children have been given such blankets to cover themselves during detainment.

We held our flashlights, electric candles and phone lights up toward the building, and the men inside flashed their own lights through the tiny slits in the imposing walls. It felt futile to be there and powerful at once, but mostly futile.

One of Sophie's caregivers, a legal resident originally from Guatemala thanked me for going, and I felt ashamed. There is much tension in our city as families gear up for tomorrow's ICE raids.

Meanwhile, Terrible America provides snacks and movies to the thousands of children separated from their families, languishing in private facilities whose boards are stocked with profit-hungry rich men, rich men who've protected one another in the vilest of ways. Perhaps the vilest of them all, the POSPOTUS, plays golf, presides over rallies and is cheered by the most ignorant people in the country. The most powerful people in the country who continue to support him have lost whatever shreds of moral authority they might have had and will, I imagine, go down in history as spineless, lacking even a modicum of integrity.

I'm curious. I had an exchange last year with someone who objected mightily to my outrage over separating children from their parents when they sought asylum at the border. Anonymous, what do you think of the camps now? How about the children separated from their parents? How about the conditions of the camps where thousands of men, women and children are being held?

Is this who we are?

* So reported F*^king Vie President Pence after a recent "visit" to a detention camp in Texas and proceeded to blame Congress for the over-crowded conditions in the men's facilities. The photo of him and his entourage smiling their greasy smiles of paternal solicitude made me sick.

PSA for These Difficult Times

Letting my snaggle tooth hang out

You're exactly where you're supposed to be this moment. I tend to project all my fear out into the future, but you know what? It's my present that's terrifying at times, and I have to tell myself that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be this moment, over and over and over. Sometimes cliches are necessary.

Here's the PSA part of this post:

Do you listen to The Daily? It's a daily podcast that digs deep into a pertinent issue for twenty minutes, five days a week. The New York Times does it, so I suppose some of you out there reading will say it's fake news or liberal biased media or whatever lazy cliches are being thrown about. I say lazy because we're all subject to lazy, particularly intellectual laziness, and these times call for us to gird our loins and pay attention and read quality journalism and listen to careful, investigative work. I think The Daily does important reporting, and from what I've listened to for many months, it appears to cover sides of an issue when that's pertinent but also THE FACTS as they appear to our eyes and ears.

Truth is always truth, contrary to what you might have heard out of the Powers That Be's very own mouths.

Today's podcast was Part One of a two-part series called Divided: How Family Separations Started, 

and it'll blow your mind and break your heart.

Recently, I wrote a post detailing my happiness at Sophie finally starting her new adult day program. One of my Anonymous commenters wrote this:

What, you are happy with a great program for Sophie. That is wonderful. But what about all the children separated from their parents at the border?

I replied:

Anonymous, what do you mean? Have I forgotten that our government kidnapped thousands of children and put them in internment camps. Never. Doing what I can — do you need info or resources on how you can help them?

I suspect that this is the same Anonymous who spent a lot of time on an earlier post of mine defending the separation policy, so I'm hoping that she listens to the podcast. I wonder, too, whether her feelings about the great tragedy on our borders have evolved at all. The reason why I'm wondering is because I think it's going to take as many people as possible to exact justice. Yesterday, the POSPOTUS himself blessed and spoke warmly to those who work for ICE and for their actions at the border. 

So what can we do about the clusterfuck beyond educating ourselves? The obvious solutions are to pressure your representatives to work toward reuniting these children with their families, to vote for those people who fight injustice, to donate money or even donate and subscribe to the ACLU, to protest whenever there are gatherings, to hold your government responsible, to speak the truth and refrain from arguing that there's any reason at all to separate any child from his or her parent because they are seeking asylum or a better life for their families and happen to have brown skin.

Here are some more ideas that I found on the Internets.

1. Become a child advocate.
2. Become a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for young people in foster care or donate to your local CASA program
3. Donate to Comfort Case which gives backpacks of comfort items to kids in foster care
4. Volunteer to visit people in immigration detention.
5. Help transform your faith community or business into a sanctuary space.
6. If you happen to be a lawyer, paralegal or law student, a number of organizations are looking for pro bono volunteers.

Click HERE for more information and links to explore the above.

The Daily

#familiesbelongtogether

#resist

On "Civility"

Yesterday, I marched in downtown Los Angeles against the Trump administration's policy to separate immigrant children from their parents at our "border." I joined tens of thousands of other Los Angelenos on a beautiful southern California afternoon in protest of our government separating thousands of children in what appears to be a systematic form of child abuse and crime against humanity.

America is not a great country at this point, if it ever was, and anyone who's arguing for more civility is deluded and naive. My friend, the great writer Lidia Yuknavitch said the other day on her social media account that civility has always been determined by those in power. 

Civility has always been defined by those in power.

We have babies in cages on our "border" (not to mention the dismantling of environmental laws to protect the planet, the specter of women losing reproductive rights, the vilifying of the press, the collusion with world dictators, the Muslim ban, the racism that permeates literally every single directive from the POSPOTUS and his enablers) and are being told, even by those on our "side" (Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, etc.) that it isn't "American" to deny someone like the lying press secretary a peaceful dinner in your restaurant. This doesn't settle with me -- and not the so-called lack of civility.

What, exactly, does civility mean, and how has it been defined in this country from its very inception?

These aren't rhetorical questions but, rather, real ones that are if not tormenting me than at least filling up my mind to the extent that I feel near anguish. The anguish comes, I think, because the situation at hand calls for so much self-reflection -- so much probing of one's interior, one's ego, one's impulse to be right. I say one's because I imagine it's true for a lot of people, particularly those of us who are privileged (and I don't mean economically; I mean white). What does it even mean to be a good person, to act with civility when the very definition of the word has been determined and defined by those in power?

The center does not hold.

I feel the same way when I read arguments against what white men call "tribalism" or "polarization." Honestly?

I got into an argument on a friend's thread on Facebook -- not with the friend but with one of his "friends." I've sparred with this guy before, and while I'd like to make him irrelevant by not even engaging with him (his comments are nearly always dull and condescending with that overwhelming sarcasm and fake irony that marks the intellectually lazy), I'm learning through the engagement what it takes to be truly disobedient. Or maybe what it might take to be truly disobedient to the mores and definitions of civility that not only our ancestors but also our contemporaries demand.

Again, I'm just thinking about these things. I am certain of very little.

I'm a person who has trouble even uttering the word fuck, mainly because of the way I've been brought up, yet in uttering the word fuck I alienate even my own parents whom I love.

The person with whom I sparred on Facebook responded to my call for civil disobedience by asking whether I was prepared to be violent against my fellow citizens because being disobedient might cause a schism like we haven't seen since the Civil War. He asked, "Prepared to defend and even harm others if need be?"

I answered, "I will personally not commit acts of violence against any human beings, but I am prepared to stand against anything. That means anything. Absolutely. There are plenty of examples of peaceful and resolute civil disobedience across history. It's not a matter of "winning" or "losing." I align with those people. When and if my rights as a woman are compromised as they very well will or might be very soon, I will stand against that and for other women, minorities and the disabled."

I added, "The path to change is seldom polite. And the definition of civility is generally set by those in POWER."

The guy responded, "The definition of civility in this country was originally established when the first inhabitants began following the codes and mores of western civilization, along with the principles of the rule of law. Men opening doors for women, pulling their chairs out. You know that kind of demeaning, misogynistic behavior ya'll are so eager to abolish in favor of...I don't know what. Hip hop?"

If I had one, I'd rest my case. 

Mull on that, Reader.

 What Kind of Times Are These

By Adrienne Rich

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

 

#FamiliesBelongTogether

Venice Blvd.
Los Angeles, California
June 20, 2018

Do you remember as a child getting separated from your mother in a public place? I was with my mother shopping one day and probably in a world of my own, in my head, day-dreaming as she walked through aisles of clothes racks. I can't have been more than six or seven and perhaps even younger. At some point I grabbed the hand hanging in my view and looked up simultaneously, thinking it was my mother. Except it was not. It was a stranger. I remember that moment of terror -- only a moment because the woman whose hand I'd grabbed looked kindly at me, and my own mother was in sight -- like it was yesterday. A moment of terror. At being separated from my mother.


Is there anything else to do but think about, agitate about, write about and above all, ACT ABOUT these children separated from their parents at the United States border. Despite the POSPOTUS' rescinding of the policy he and his henchman initiated and the band of thugs who have carried it out, it's unclear whether hundreds, if not thousands of these babies and children will ever be reunited with their parents.

Babies in tents.

Where are the girls?

I'm making all the POS folks who supported this policy irrelevant in my mind. I'm not responding to their inane, inhumane arguments.  Those who believe America to be a Christian nation. The vile human who made a joke about a child with Down Syndrome being separated from parents. I'm brushing them away.  Those who compare the people of Mexico and Central America to vermin. Be gone.

And those who invoke the great peace leaders of the world and admonish us not to be angry, that it's all about love -- step aside. The great peace leaders were plenty angry, and they used their anger in constructive ways to bring peace. You step aside, too, or step up.

Here are some things we can do:

What You Can Do Right Now to Help Immigrant Families Separated at the Border

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images