Separation Anxiety

Published in somewhat edited form June 20, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I have just watched online a CNN  interview with John Moore, the Getty photographer who took the photograph that went viral over the weekend of a wailing two-year-old on the ground near the border.  She's a little Honduran girl in hot pink shirt and shoes, black pants; her mother had just put her down,  obeying the orders of a border patrol guard who was about to begin a body search.

           

     Moore said the mother, who’d just spent a month crossing Mexico, did not know what was coming.  She did not know what was going to happen to her, much less that her daughter, who she’d carried the whole trip, would be taken from her person.  She had no idea that her daughter would be taken to some unknown place where she would not be able to protect her child, much less know if she was safe.  But the photographer knew, and the separation anxiety he witnessed in the little girl set off separation anxiety in him and magnified it 100 times.

           

     Although the tears he captured on film were a normal two-year-old’s reaction to uncertainty, I think they represent what we all are feeling after learning what we’re doing at the border.  “The families there had no idea they were about to be separated from their children,” he said.  “I could tell they weren’t up on the recent news, they’ve been traveling in difficult conditions.  But I knew what was going to happen next.  And for me to take these pictures, scenes that I’d seen before but with the knowledge that these parents and their children would soon be in separate detention facilities – made it hard for me personally as a journalist, as a human being, and especially as a father.”  Then he added, just as the interview ended, “on Father’s Day.”

           

     That tail-end comment brought me close to understanding something my father always said about never losing your concern for your children.  John Moore, the photographer, is silver-haired; his children are likely out of the nest at least and safely on their own journey.  But for many people, the desire to protect and provide never leaves.  Those feelings of responsibility are extended when the events of childhood and child-raising leave scars on one or both sides of the equation.

     Many professionals, like Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Association of Pediatrics, have expressed concern for the long-term impacts on the children from this separation from their parents.  But I have tremendous fear also for the parents, and not only what they’re feeling now, but will feel about themselves in the future.  Some of these families will get through this, roughed up but intact.  Some of them won’t.

           

     Do any of you remember the film “Sophie’s Choice?”  In it, the Nazis forced Meryl Streep’s character to decide which child to keep with her, her son or her daughter, with the unchosen child to be taken away by the tyrants.  The scene has never left my body; I can still see her standing in line, paralyzed, traumatized.  My mind has blocked out which child she chose, but not her only recourse for  having made the decision, which was suicide.  The “choice” forced upon her was deliberately inhuman.   I think what we're doing to these families is, too. 

           

     This administration’s action is not a question of enforcing the laws.  It’s trying to force the country’s already-divided politicians into a frenetic free-for-all, while Donald Trump stands aside, watching gleefully at the mayhem he’s created.  The immigrant families are merely hostages of yet another malevolent scheme to make DT look effective.  But now we’re hostages, too, those of us brought to tears by the stories of family separations.  I think what we’re grieving is the breaking of the parent-child bond.  Let us use our empathetic grief to change this policy.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who lives in Lindsay.  You can send your thoughts to her at P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Be sure to read "When ICE Comes" as well  from two weeks ago.

 

When ICE Comes

Published June 6, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     There is a beautiful, tall row of corn growing in the back yard of the house next door to mine where once there was a dense hedge of pyracantha, commonly known as the Firethorn bush.  Although the cedar waxwings undoubtedly miss the red berries in winter on both sides of their north-south migration, my neighbors will be eating from their little piece of land this year, something I admire.

           

     Changes in vegetation are only one of the differences in my neighborhood since I first moved here.  Once there were workers and managers at Lindsay Olive, an ag chemist, the owner of the Chevron station, and a farm labor contractor whose crews served the nearby Sunkist packinghouse.  Now I don’t know where anyone works or where they’re from, a reflection of my reclusive nature and their commute schedules.  Our language differences add a small complication to the non-local nature of our lives.

           

     I imagine that’s not too different from many neighborhoods in our small towns now.  I don’t know the citizenship status of my neighbors, and I certainly wouldn’t ask, out of politeness.  They’re my neighbors, and I keep looking for ways to act accordingly despite my ignorance of their lives.  But since the March 13^th  meeting of the Lindsay City Council, when the Council was approached by activated citizens seeking official support for DACA students (which the Council gave,) I have been wondering what I would do if ICE showed up at my neighbors’ doors.

           

     In Germany during WWII, when their government’s agents known as Brown Shirts came to take away Jewish neighbors, the non-Jewish neighbors had two responses.  One was to hide behind the curtains and watch, assuming the government knew what it was doing or remaining silent, simply too afraid to make a peep.  The other, much riskier, was to take their Jewish neighbors into their homes and hide them.  With 20/20 hindsight, we have become judgmental about the curtain-watchers, but are blind to the fact that here in good old America there are no stories about families taking in their Japanese neighbors when they were being rounded up by our government officials and taken away to internment camps.

           

     Mark Smith, pastor of both the Exeter and Lindsay Methodist Churches, was at the March 13^th Lindsay City Council meeting, where we met organizers from CHIRLA, the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights (Los Angeles.)  CHIRLA has a new office in Porterville, and the organizers were eager to find ways of serving the community. 

           

     Wanting to know what we can do to help, we met with them and decided to sponsor one of their workshops on immigrants’ rights.  This workshop will be held at Lindsay United Methodist Church’s Maxwell Hall on Sunday, June 10^th at 5:30 p.m.  It will be conducted primarily in Spanish to serve those residents, documented and undocumented, who could benefit from knowing what to do if and when ICE comes to their door.  We hope to begin the process of learning what the rest of us might do as well.  Please join us if you can, and watch this column for further developments.

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Trudy Wischemann is co-editor of the forthcoming volume A Little Piece of Land:  Writings on Agriculture and the Common Good in California.  You can send her your thoughts on ICE incursions c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

           

We Need to Talk

Published May 9, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     The phrase “We need to talk” can sound menacing when it comes from a boss or a mate, implying the need for some change the hearer may not want. And it might sound menacing to you when I say it regarding immigration issues.  These issues are so longstanding here in the Valley that we think our lives depend on them.  They’re part of the status quo, and that’s what I think we need to talk about.

           

     Monday morning’s Fresno Bee carried yet another front-page story about the trials of people facing deportation who were brought here as children through no fault of their own.  I’m going to call them “importees” from now on, for the sense of involuntariness is what moves us to care, and it should.

           

     This man, Vanna In, considered Cambodian but born in Viet Nam in the mid-1970’s when our war on that country was just ending, leaving rice paddies, roads, villages and towns in ruins, has become a minister to gang members, having been one himself.  He’s not just a productive member of society, he’s a healer of one of this society’s wounds.  But his early childhood education, so to speak, leaves him extremely vulnerable in this tragic political moment, when Congress is too hamstrung to act.  He faces deportation to Cambodia, where he has never lived.

           

     The article, written by Carmen George, who has been bringing us compelling pieces of beauty from our region for several years now, tells how we might help this singular man.  Rev. Vanna In has petitioned Gov. Jerry Brown for a pardon, which could lead to citizenship if granted.  A petition in support of that request is available at www.change.org, and has gathered over 7,000 signatures already.

           

     We need to do more, however, than help people one at a time.  President Trump’s machete-like action cutting off the DACA program, which provided a measure of stability to some of these importees, was a rash challenge to Congress, a wielding of the power of the pen to provoke legislative action toward resolving our unresolved immigration issues.  But Congress cannot resolve them while we, the people, are so unresolved ourselves.

           

     There are people in this country, powerful people, who benefit economically from the availability of undocumented (“illegal”) immigrants.  Their political influence will make it difficult to find a national legislative solution.  Meanwhile, the economic costs are borne by the immigrants themselves and by the communities in which they live.  Rev. Vanna In’s story, luckily, shows us the benefits we also receive at the community level.

           

     Perhaps this story and others will help us start the conversations we need to be having at the local level about immigration:  about who qualifies as “American” and how we gain that status, the pathways to citizenship.  About what we do, as neighbors and friends, when ICE comes to the door of the house down the street, supposedly to “fix” the problem of illegal immigration, but ripping apart families, churches, neighborhoods, and communities instead.

           

     We need to talk, and we need to talk now, before ICE comes.  Let’s find a way to do it.

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Trudy Wischemann is the granddaughter of immigrants before there were laws to prevent them from entering.  You can send her your immigrant origins c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.