On a flight home from Los Angeles, I sat next to a young woman, a millennial apparently, who busied herself the whole flight reading a very slick fashion magazine. I notice a book in the back-of-the-seat pouch in front of her. The title was Buddha’s Brain.
I had seen that title somewhere, but could not remember. I asked the millennial to describe the subject of the book. She replied with clear conviction that it was the answer to, well, everything.. Naturally, I had to find out what this and perhaps other millennials might think is “the answer to, well, everything.” As we disembarked, I vowed to myself to look up this book.
Meanwhile, like everyone, I continued feeling bombarded with additional revelations about “the Feds” arbitrary separation of young children from their parents. These folks’ only “crime” was openly to cross our border at official crossings to request asylum from violence in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, or some other dictatorship where we support any totalitarian despot willing to go along with U.S. foreign policy.
When Evil Goes Around, Suffering Comes Around
The U.S. trained many Central American officials in the use of secret police, assassination squads, etc., at an institution once called “The School of the Americas,” located in the U.S. Some earlier refugees from political violence ended up on our urban poverty zones. Some of their children fell into local street gangs. MS-13, which originated in Los Angeles, California, in the 1980s, was one of them. Then we deported them to their home nation where those same gangs took hold.
Now, threatened by street gangs or government kill squads, some parents flee from those countries with their children under threat of torture or death. The new federal response is to ignore all legal procedure for assessing and adjudicating requests for asylum. They throw parents in jail after taking their children, some infants and toddlers, from their parents under false pretenses, such as claims they are taking them to give them a shower.
This political ploy may be the worst Trumpery of all (the word trumpery derives from the Middle English trompery and ultimately from the Middle French tromper, meaning “to deceive“). The current administration variously claims to use this family torture as a deterrent to others intending to seek asylum (true, and evil), that they are only following some law the Democrats passed (lie, there is no such law), or that it is complying with a biblical admonition from God (lie, in the form of selective biblical misquotation).
In fact, Trump administration practices violate both international and U.S. law and custom in their gross and violent actions resulting entirely from the administration’s own choice. These people are committing gross abuses of the human rights of the families involved. Sessions has the unmitigated gall to claim that if the parents did not want that to happen, they should not come to our borders seeking asylum. We have laws and procedures for asylum seekers, which the administration routinely and cavalierly violates, just like so many others. The Attorney General of the U.S. refuses to carry out our laws, in order to achieve a frankly racist and definitely evil political purpose.
Cultural Consensus and Compassion in America
Ralph Nader has argued that if Americans could just get past their partisan debates about abstract political ideology and discuss only the dangers or benefits to their communities by a given action or policy, they could easily come to agreement in their mutual interests. That might not be true in all cases, especially where special economic interests in the outcome are at stake.
However, when the lives and sanity of innocent children are at stake, almost every American would stand up and object to the cruel and unusual, and entirely illegitimate abuse of children that our government is currently conducting in the name of “law and order.” Most Americans are compassionate when they see suffering. Wake up!
Learning from Buddha’s Brain
The book, Buddha’s Brain, is a compilation of principles for living well that result from the integration of the recent findings of neuro-science with 2000 years of Buddhist meditation practice. This remarkable convergence demonstrates the value of practicing mindfulness (clarity and focus of attention on what is important in any moment) and the compassion that results when we are able to widen our circle of “us” to include all of humanity, and even the world. That is when violence, abuse, and torture wane. Do not dismiss all millennials because some were raised with too much sense of entitlement. Some millennials are clearly paying attention.
Call your Senator and your Representative today and demand that they pass a law immediately, explicitly forbidding the separation of children from their parents by any government agency, unless and until the parent is convicted of a crime, sentenced, and imprisoned.
On this matter, a national consensus without compromise is the only way to redeem the moral standing of the American people by our mindfulness of the evil that confronts us so that we can exercise human compassion by demanding that caring for children must overcome petty politics. If we do not act to demand compassion, we are complicit in the torture of children.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 