"And They All Sat Back And Said What A Terrible Shame It was."

I am having a terrible time today coping with the images and sounds of innocent children being separated from their parents on our southern border. Each one of those images, each one of those sounds, makes me more and more deadly angry at the Administration that ordered such actions and the American people --- all of us --- who are more-or-less blithely going about our days: "And they all sat back and said what a terrible shame it was." 

 

I turn my head sitting at this desk and I can see a photograph full of ghosts, of people I never knew, some of whose names I carry. There is my Grandfather Yehudah, my Grandmother Dvorah, my maiden Great-Aunt Rachel Leah, my Aunt Shurah, my little Aunt Fanny (called "Poupette" by the family), and there are two boys, my uncle Chaim and my father. Of all the people I named, only my father survived Nazism. Of the people I named, Chaim and Poupette were both younger than my father, who was only a boy of sixteen when he was liberated from the death camp of Dachau. Poupette was perhaps ten when she met her end, along with my Grandmother and Aunt Rachel. When the Ghetto of Kovno (Lithuania) was finally "liquidated" (meaning that 90 percent of the Jews living there had already been killed) the scant survivors were separated. The men went to Dachau. The women were sent to Stutthof, a concentration camp on the Baltic Sea. After a brief time, the women, my family members among them, were placed on barges which were towed offshore. German shore batteries then used the barges, teeming with terrified women and girls, for target practice. Their bones lie at the bottom the Baltic, unremembered except by a few historians like myself. 

That is what I see when I see the images of the "detention centers" Trump has created. That is what I heard when I listened to the crying children on the audio track released today. And tonight I hear that most of the young girls, about 100 under the age of four, have vanished --- no one knows where they are. Little girls, just gone.There is an evil cancer eating at the heart of America, and its name is Trump. 

But there is more. The other day I was having a conversation with a friend, and we were discussing the intensity with which I treat my close relationships. Sometimes it is overwhelming, and I know it. Sometimes it has cost me, even out of my best motives. 

I did not tell this friend a story that perhaps I should have, but I will tell it now, and maybe my friend will see it and understand what I am. When I was very young, six years old at most, I underwent a series of surgeries that were supposed to help my gait. On the way to one surgery, I was attended by only one young doctor, who was accompanying me to the operating room. In the elevator, alone, he began to tell me what awaited me: "First they are going to cut you. And then you're going to bleed. And . . . " So much of it I have suppressed, but it is there in my outrage, sometimes articulate, sometimes vulgar, at injustice and unfairness. Kindness is everything. Compassion is everything.
But there was neither for me that day. By the time the elevator doors opened my body was locked in a rictus of sheer terror. My parents rushed over.

"What happened to him?" my mother wailed. 

"Oh, he's gone into hysterical paralysis," the young doctor said breezily. "No problem." Not for him.
What I remember most of that moment was my mother's tormented face, and the tears streaming down my father's cheeks. It was one of only two times I saw him weep, the other being when my mother's life was endangered during a health crisis. 

The surgery had to be delayed an hour or two until I was calm enough to be sedated. Think about that. I often think of that young physician sadistically entertaining himself, using the terror of a small child as a toy. He's probably retired by now. He might even be dead, I hope. But I doubt he ever gave his actions that day a second thought. Like so many Nazis. Like so many denizens of the Trump cabal. 

I developed a sense of abandonment it took years of hard psychological and spiritual work to overcome, and a sense of isolation which still haunts me despite my beliefs and understandings.

That's what I have been feeling today.

Yes, I feel things intensely, my loves. I want to protect those I care about, and even those I don't know who may be in need, because I don't know if anyone else will. I know I can't depend on anyone else to pick up that slack. People so often don't. 

Yes, I can be a little overwhelming at times because I would rather surfeit those I love with love, for love can be taken away --- by accident, illness, mischance, war, and evil intentions --- in a moment. As it was from me, on two sunny bright March 15ths not long ago. As it was in a brief six weeks in early 2013. 

Maybe the love I give you today will carry you through a dark time when you need it and nothing else and no one else is there for you. Maybe you'll be lucky, and you'll never need to tap that reserve. But I want you to have it. Because there are too many people who want to put you in cages or behind wire or perpetrate abuses on you, or rapes, or other wickednesses. I'm only me. But I'm damn well going to be the most me I can be. For you. And for me. I can't be anything else. That's my gift and my curse.

So make of it what you will.