Someone's Baby

God, those photos of the men stacked up in a concentration camp in El Salvador... Piled up like commodities, made faceless, dehumanized by their captors both foreign and domestic. 

Each one of them was someone's baby. Now grown, they are heaped upon each other, discarded, hope stolen, kidnapped from their own families. 

Part of the beautiful, terrible magic of parenting is that all children somehow became my children. One of the daily horrors of the previous Trump administration was protecting my own tender, gorgeous infant in my arms as babies his age slept in cages, wailing for their own mothers, standing alone in court, parents lost to them in an extrajudicial system that has expanded to horrifying overseas operations in this term. I couldn’t save them all. I could only hold onto one.

Now, we are given this vision of adulthood for men. Trump's supporters continue to dehumanize migrant men, framing them as dangerous criminals to justify the lawless detention and abuse they are suffering, when in actual fact so many of them came to our country to escape violence. They trusted us to be better than the criminals they endured.

And each of them was someone's baby. 

How can I look at my own sons, brilliant and beautiful, and not fear that they might also someday be treated with such disregard and hatred? Am I really supposed to trust the capriciousness of racism to protect them from such a fate, knowing how racists are motivated by their own extreme insecurity and fear? 

Racism protects no one. Insecurity and fear breed only violence and spasms of dominance. Relying on whiteness leans into the same dehumanization that delivers the results we're seeing now. Racism overspills the imaginary lines constructed by those that cling to it; it’s coming for all of us, eventually, regardless of our skin color or the content of our character. We all become faceless before it, reduced to the meanest calculation of our value. The only answer is to see it for what it is, and tear it down.

I look up at our administration, and see an array of broken men, insecure and fearful, drawn like moths to a flame toward the biggest bully. Tortured by their own fathers, hating their own mothers, beating their own wives, neglecting their own children. These criminals--some subject to the very due process denied to the men of CECOT--we tolerate, as they rain down further abuse in hopes that someday, finally, they might feel strong enough. 

And each of them was someone's baby, too. 

Many of them are famous for their stories of human failure. We don't have to guess at what made this administration this way, because their politics of grievance spell it out each day. They can never be stronger than the abusive fathers that tormented them as children or abandoned them, but they work each day to keep women under their heel and a hierarchy of racism available so they can feel taller as the bodies stack up. They can steal someone else’s father and throw him away like garbage, but they can never repair their own fractured souls by doing so. They can sell fear, but they can never feel safe.

What will it take to ensure that my own sons won't be failed men in this way? Will my daily work be enough so that they see others as fully formed individuals, each with their own dreams and difficulties, and emerge into adulthood with their empathy intact? 

They are my babies. I see them with hopeful eyes, wrap my love around them, and grieve for all the ones I cannot reach. With the spectre of failure looming large, I try my best to fight this fight on many fronts. 

We were all someone's baby. May we hold each other gently, and grow beyond this hateful brokenness of insecure men with too much power.