God Bless the Child...Just Not in the U.S.

I wish that I could have chosen another topic for my weekly toon, but this is it. The barbarity of the Trump administration, the enabling cowardly Republicans and, lest we forget, the Democrats who were only too happy to support similar policies under the Obama administration...all out of fear of looking "weak."

How exactly does anyone look weak by protecting vulnerable children and adults? Does anyone have any idea of what asylum seekers have had to go through before they ever reach the border? It was only with the heart-breaking images and sounds of children being snatched from their parents and kept in holding pens that so-called "leaders" finally spoke up to voice their opposition to Trump's Zero Tolerance policy. You didn't hear them making too much noise 4 years ago, when unaccompanied minors were fleeing from the terror of their homes in Central America.

News Flash. Keeping families together in ICE detention centers has proven hazardous to asylum seekers' and immigrants' health. There are high rates of incidence sexual abuse and exploitation, dehumanizing treatment and then there's just the trauma of being incarcerated for the "crime" of trying to escape the violent conditions and consequences created by decades of militaristic U.S. foreign policy in Central America.

And while many of us would all like to focus on Trump for being the source of this amoral policy, many of us would also like to ignore the United States' long, ignominious history of brutalizing children with the enslavement and trade of Africans, the genocide of Native Americans, and our continued refusal to pull children out of poverty, choosing instead to spin nonsensical myths to justify our callousness, which are really just exercises in blaming the victim.

So, yes, let's criticize Trump and the Republicans. Yes, let's make them pay in the upcoming midterms, But let's not think for one minute that even if they were all swept from office tomorrow that we, as a nation, would finally do right by our children.

Nativism Scene

Just back from a vay-kay in Belgium. While I took a break from work, I kept up with the news. Big mistake. It's already cliche to say that the Trump administration can't go any lower. Well, it's gone lower...again. Its decision to implement a policy of separating parents from children when refugee families, seeking asylum in the U.S., cross the border has been rightly called barbaric. Sadly, it's only the logical extension of the same policies that the Obama and Bush administrations had in place. So, of course, leave it to the Trump administration to take it to a whole new level of cruelty, abuse, nativism and national abasement.

I don't really have much more to say, except that for every day we tolerate this policy, we are revealing ourselves for who we really are as a society. Let's see if I'm forced to repeat myself again next month during the next round of our nationwide limbo dance to hell.

Let's all see just how low we can go.