Think about it. As these words are being written, we have
children trapped in cages on our southern border in what are being described as
unsanitary, unhealthy and unsafe conditions. (Unless, of course, you’re a
Republican member of Congress, presidential adviser Stephen Miller or an ICE
agent, in which case these cages are more like summer camps.)
What crime did these children commit that sentenced them to live
in a cage? Oh, yeah, they were brought to America by a parent or relative in
search of a better life. Shame on them for doing that. I guess they deserve to
be locked up indefinitely without their parents and forced to wallow in their
own (and someone else’s) filth.
At the same time, we have billionaire white men raping and
abusing 12-, 13- and 14-year-old girls at lavish parties attended by luminaries
including, allegedly, the current president of the United States, then buying
their way out of serious trouble by making secret deals with a federal
prosecutor who later became part of said president’s cabinet. This serial child
rape continued for years, in which no one seemed to care.
Beyond that, I still haven’t gotten over the images I
conjured up in my mind after hearing that 5- and 6-year-old children were
ripped apart by bullets at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Connecticut, and that happened nearly
seven years ago. It was the outrageous school shooting that was supposed to
bring about a drastic change in our nation’s gun laws…until it wasn’t…and to this
day nothing but sadness, grief and a few suicides have resulted from the event.
Add to this all of the other school shootings that have
taken place since Newtown, including the killing of 17 at Marjorie Stoneman
Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which again focused our attention on
school safety until the NRA and other gun rights advocates turned the
discussion into arming all of our teachers, thus setting up a Wild West
scenario in which an “active shooter” situation could easily turn into an all-out
firefight between heavily armed intruders and your eighth grade biology
teacher.
Never mind that the Parkland students who survived the horror
have become advocates for gun safety laws, and for their efforts have become victims
again—victims of ridicule, attacks on social media, misinformation, lies, death
threats, criticism and scorn. Just another day in America.
And now, in the wake of the right-wing-ization of the U.S.
Supreme Court, we have a number of southern states enacting draconian abortion
laws that purport to protect unborn children by punishing women for getting pregnant
(never mind that a man had to help with the process), and by criminalizing abortion
at virtually every stage of pregnancy. Never before has a zygote enjoyed such
legislative attention, “human” rights, personal privileges and protection under
the law.
If this new wave of anti-abortion laws doesn’t convince the U.S.
Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, I can’t imagine what will come next.
Perhaps the Alabama legislature will declare that life begins when a woman
consumes two or more glasses of wine and then takes off her pants.
And finally, our children are becoming unwitting victims of climate
change, also known as “that unproven liberal hoax” over on the Fox News and
Propaganda Channel.
Now, it may not seem that a discussion of climate change
fits in with an essay about children’s safety until you think about it for a
minute. Five years ago, I think it was, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change warned us what would happen if we continued to rely on fossil fuels for
our energy. The IPCC said if we burned more than 30% of our known fossil fuel
reserves, we would cross an environmental “red line” by the year 2040,
resulting in more extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heat waves,
rising sea levels and so on. And if we were to burn ALL of our available fossil
fuels, the IPCC said, humans would find large parts of the planet uninhabitable
outdoors.
Let me repeat that. Parts of our planet would become uninhabitable
out of doors.
As I previously wrote in this blog, the year 2040 is not
some unreachable date far out in the future. It's only 21 years from now. My children will be roughly my age now
and my grandchildren will be younger than my children are today. That means
that for everyone who has young children or grandchildren, this is not a joke
or some cruel liberal hoax. This is the future their children face as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels.
So set aside for a moment the immigration issue, gun rights
and wealthy sexual predators—all of which pose a serious threat to our children—and
come to the realization that there is perhaps no greater threat than what we’re
doing voluntarily to the planet on which they live. I get angry every time I
hear someone profess to be “pro life” when scientifically, the only life they
care about isn’t really even alive.
There are plenty of living children in the world right now who
need to be protected from actual threats: Hunger, famine, climate catastrophe,
the ravages of an angry planet and even extinction, not to mention the aforementioned
incarceration, gun violence and sexual assault. I don’t know when or why we
stopped caring about those children the way we care about the yet unborn.
I only know that we did, and I find that heartbreaking
beyond any words.
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