The New Yorker:
The innocence of children is, in large measure, defined by their shock when confronted by the cruelty of the adult world. When you see a child being smacked across the face by an adult three or four times her size, the child’s expression is often one less of pain than of confusion. In “The Fire Next Time,” James Baldwin described, in 1963, how black children were innocent of a “basic” American reality—that “white people hold the power”—and only slowly began to sense the anxiety of parents fearful that their son or daughter might challenge the world’s assumptions. It is a small mercy, Baldwin suggests, that full understanding comes only with time: “A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other.”
On the Texas side of the Mexican border today, thousands of children, by order of the Trump Administration, are learning what it is to be objects of deliberate state-sponsored cruelty. In a heartless act designed to arouse the furies of his electoral base, the President has ordered children to be separated from their parents and stowed in tent cities and cages and a hollowed-out former Walmart. The Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, justifies this act of “zero tolerance” by quoting from Scripture: “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.” This is the political leadership of the United States—at once cruel and sanctimonious. And it is on this platform of division, fear, and cruelty that the President has chosen to lead his party into the 2018 midterm elections.
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