Your child before you is a child anywhere.
We are singing ‘Wheels on the Bus’. The child before me stands up and trundles over the pillows to turn and face the others who wait for her to make the noise of a bull charging. She roars her squeaky roar, and they all follow when the bull rides the bus, roaring and swaying, the Indian boys, the Bangladeshi, the Chinese-African-American girl, the Russian boy, the Mexican baby who makes the morning’s tiniest spiders with her thumb and forefinger, the boy from East London who has yet to smile, the blondes and the ones in superhero t-shirts, the dark haired ones so shy they hide their faces in their mothers’ laps.
A child before you is a child everywhere.
If your home was a horror of gangs and extortion, murder and tyranny, would you not flee to a promise of safety and a new beginning? Would you not wish that new beginning especially for your children?
Every child fleeing terror and hunger is a child you know for you understand how a child afraid will act, will cry, will tremble, will remember.
And if your child was forcibly taken from you, and you were not told where he or she was going or who would protect them, how would you feel?
Any child broken or commodified, called beast or christened alien is a child before us all.
I’d like to imagine a magic-realist about-face so that all those children set upon by predators or criminals … or herded into camps by those bearing flags, would find the sheltered love they merit only because they are alive, but those lives do not appear in a book by Marquez or a fantasy of any kind. In our country, fear is a power now used against children, and it grinds them to powder.
This is being done in our name.
