“The day he was to sell the children from their mother he would tell that mother to go to some other place to do some work and in their absence he would sell the children.”
– The Slave Narratives, Federal Writers Project, 1936-1938.
"They're asking for me and telling me to pack up because I had to go. Well, [I] pack up a few little things - no suitcases, my hunting bag is still kind of dirty. [I] throw whatever stuff [I] had in it and go. I didn't get to say goodbye to my dad or my brother Allan, didn't get to pet my dogs or nothing. [We] marched over to... the plane - just like criminals, you know, marching with this policeman to get on the plane.”
– Testimony of Frederick Coe to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2013.
“Once you were taken from your parents, you had no more connection with them…They had their own idea about protection,” she says. “I don’t think we needed protection! People would say it was for your own good, but my own good was to stay with my mum.”
– Ruth, an Australian aborigine forcibly separated from her mother by the government. Part of what is knows as the Stolen Generations.
"Every time she would come up and knock on the door and ask to see her baby, they would just say, 'Go away. You're not fit to be a mother…She went to the priest to ask for me from the foster home to bring me to England. The priest said no."
– P.J. Haverty, former resident, St. Mary’s Home For Babies, Tuam, Ireland, to the Toronto Globe and Mail, 2017.
In the first home I scream for six weeks. Then I am moved to another family, and I stop screaming. I give up. Nothing around me is known to me. All those around me are strangers. I have no past. I have no future. I have no identity. I am nowhere. I am frozen in fear. It is the only emotion I possess now. As a three-year-old child, I believe that I must have made some terrible mistake to have caused my known world to disappear. I spend the rest of my life trying desperately not to make another mistake. – Yoka Verdoner, The Guardian, June 18, 2018.
We choose the history of which we are a part. Some of us are lucky enough to live long enough to see the history of which we choose to be a part play out. Some of us are unlucky enough to see the history of which we choose to be a part play out, too. Some of us are lucky enough to be proud of the history of which we choose to be a part. Some of us are unlucky enough the be ashamed of the history of which we choose to be a part.
Someday, there will be an anonymous voice from Guatemala, or a Frederick Coe from El Salvador, or a Ruth from Mexico, or a P.J. Haverty from Nicaragua, or a Verdoner family from Honduras. They will tell their stories of being taken from their parents and locked in cages and kennel runs. They will tell their stories of being penned up in the Texas desert. We are producing broken children at the border right now. We may also be producing criminals. But we are producing witnesses, too, and writers. Their stories will be told. Depend on that.
And right now, the rest of us, all of us, are choosing the history of which we one day will be a part. We are choosing whether or not to be characters in nightmares as yet undreamed and in novels as yet unwritten and in memories as yet unformed. Watch the choices being made. Watch the president* shuck responsibility, spread blame, encourage fear, and lose whatever tattered fragments of humanity were still a part of his very being. Watch his Secretary of Homeland Security, an increasingly loathsome apparatchik named Kirstjen Nielsen, simply try to lie her way out of the history of which she daily chooses to be a part. Watch the pathetic mewling of the Republican majorities in Congress, best exemplified by that useless “moderate,” Susan Collins of Maine, try to cut cheap bargains with their own souls. Watch officials of this government tell members of Congress not to believe the evidence of their own eyes. Watch as the choice of histories is made, one person at a time, and forever.
The government* of the United States—the thuggish, dishonest and unfathomably cruel administration* that we elected to run the country—has chosen the history of which it will be a part. It is the history of the auction block, of the state-sponsored kidnapper, of the God-alibi-ed prison, of the rattling cattle cars, headed east. That is the history of which the government, and all the people in it, have chosen to be a part. This includes the people who dreamed up this policy, the people who are enforcing this policy, and anyone who isn’t doing anything to stop it. They will be the defendants in the future proceedings, the villains in the future novels, and the monsters in a thousand future nightmares. We choose the history of which we are a part.
Choose.
Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
