I have no words

[swan_tower]

I’ve been trying for days to figure out a way to say something about the United States’ new policy of tearing families apart, imprisoning children, telling the parents their kids are being taken away “to have a bath,” dosing them with antipsychotics to ensure compliance.

I can’t. The sick horror I feel won’t go into words. This is the best I can do, and it falls short.

I know this is not the first such atrocity my country has committed. From slavery to Native American genocide to Japanese internment camps, we’ve done shit like this before, and worse. But that doesn’t make this one any less gutting.

At least there’s outrage. We aren’t yet so numb to unspeakable cruelty that people are taking this lying down. But — some people are. CNN quoted a guy saying “Quit trying to make us feel teary-eyed for the children. Yes, I love children a great deal, but to me, it’s up to the parents to do things rightfully and legally.” Empathy is dead in that man. Whoever he is, he has the shape of a human being, but inside he’s hollow.

We can’t become like him. We cannot let the human soul of this country — a soul we have been trying, slowly, painfully, to build for nearly two hundred and fifty years — be scraped out and cast away. We have to stop this, and then take steps to prevent it from happening again.

It couldn’t happen here?

It is happening. Right now.

We have to make it stop.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

Comments

[sovay]

I can’t. The sick horror I feel won’t go into words. This is the best I can do, and it falls short.

I don't think it matters. It's words. I mean that. I have been seeing for days no words, no words, and I know there are things so painful that no one knows how to talk about them, I know that words vanish in anger or grief, I know that words by themselves have never held back bulldozers or bullets or barbed wire, and I don't think it matters. There have to be words. They don't have to be the perfect words. It is probably impossible for them to be the perfect words. But otherwise the other side is the only one speaking; otherwise their story is the only one that will last. Otherwise silence passes for assent and then becomes it. Otherwise the barbed wire and bullets are the only thing in the world. It's why even if Adorno was right (and I'm not sure he was) that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, it still has to be done, or Auschwitz has the last word. When you can't find the place in the forest and you can't light the fire and no one any longer remembers the prayer, you tell the story. These words don't need to zing. They need saying. You're saying them.

[swan_tower]

It's why even if Adorno was right (and I'm not sure he was) that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, it still has to be done, or Auschwitz has the last word.

YES. I refuse to let atrocity have the last word.

[lokifan]

Empathy is dead in that man. Whoever he is, he has the shape of a human being, but inside he’s hollow.

It's so horrendous. And despite my overall belief that there's too much focus on whether things feel right in public policy (e.g. in the need to punish 'properly' rather than focus on what reduces recidivism), the fact that some people don't seem to feel emotion about this is just horrifying to me. What could be more primal than this? How do you think about parents not knowing where their children are, children wailing as they're taken away, and not need it to stop?

[swan_tower]

Step one is to convince yourself those people aren't really people.