The Stain on Our Humanity Growing Darker Day By Day

“God squeezes but doesn’t choke you” one of the residents living on the Texas/Mexico border told us when I visited as a member of Congress’s National Commission on Hunger three summers ago. http://billybearingwitness.blogspot.com/2015/07/lessons-from-our-border-for-national.html  I doubt he could be as stoic today. The tears and pleas we encountered during that trip, from families who had fled violence in search of a better life, pale in comparison to the barbaric brutality we are witnessing today as our own government, not other countries, is responsible for separating kids from their parents.  

With each passing day the stain on our humanity grows darker. So much of social justice has been a history of stalemate finally broken when confronted with the glaring contradiction to our own values.  Then justice lurches forward and we reclaim our humanity – at least part of it, at least for a time. Today America is looking in the mirror and can’t bear what it sees.

In the end it will be the children, the most vulnerable and voiceless of all, that will bring our nation back to its senses.  In our own work advancing Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign, we’ve seen how children can be the foundation for bipartisanship and measureable, life-changing progress.  Hopefully we will experience that again, on immigration issues, as the current situation on the border is seen for the unconscionable and politically craven aberration that it is. Political expedience might prolong injustice but cannot sustain it. Not if each of us speak out.