Child's Play

Has it ever been harder to be a kid?
Working with newcomers at my school, I have encountered a great many children who have come to us because they were scared, damaged, or lost. Many of the children I meet are fleeing some other reality. A much worse place than urban Oakland, which does me the favor of adjusting my own perspective. I am not living with a dozen other loosely related individuals who have had their own families torn apart by a tragic joke of a promise of a new and better life here in the United States. Some of them came with their families intact, save for mom or dad who did not make it to the refugee camp. I don't tend to discuss the irony of a government that is currently in the business of discouraging immigrants from corners of the globe that that same government has made things less than habitable in those places from which immigrants are fleeing.
That last sentence is partly the reason why I don't have that conversation. That and the fact that if I could find a way to describe the situation more succinctly, it still wouldn't make a lot of sense. Why should a child suffer because a bunch of grownups can't seem to get on the same page about how to treat our next generation?
All of which winds me back to a place some thirty years ago, back when the famine in Africa was of great concern to a great portion of the planet. We were inundated with images of crying children with swollen bellies, some clinging to life with the hordes of media standing just close enough to get a really good shot of the suffering. Put the camera down and give the kid a sandwich.
Fast forward to the various delegations traveling to our southern border to see for themselves what sort of conditions are acceptable in detention centers. The photo of the father and daughter drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande. These are families willing to risk all manner of danger, humiliation and degradation just to get a chance at a new life. The TV cameras that bear witness to the groups scrambling through their night vision reminding us of the advancing hordes, willing to risk imprisonment here rather than continue to live in fear in the world they left behind. The fear we heap on children who come to our shores as victims of a geo-political system that would like them to be terrorists to legitimize our treatment of them.
Children. Huddled masses, yearning to breathe (if not free). Let them.