Spiritual Sunday
I don’t throw around the word “evil” lightly, but the Trump administration deliberately and systematically tearing children away from their asylum-seeking parents was evil. Although some of the children were still breastfeeding, Trump and his minions didn’t care enough to ensure the families could be reunited, which means that he may have created as many as 545 permanent orphans. The heart-rending sadness of it all brings to mind the captain in Moby Dick who has lost his son, and the scene itself alludes to the Israelite mothers who lost their children to King Herod’s genocidal policies.
Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson lays out the horror:
[P]erhaps nothing more starkly illustrates the moral dimension of that decision [to be “tough” on immigrants] than the Trump administration’s policy of kidnapping children at the southern U.S. border, ripping them away from their families — and doing so for no reason other than to demonstrate Trump’s warped vision of American strength.
We learned this week that some of those separations will probably be permanent. As NBC News first reported, 545 boys and girls taken as many as three years ago — the children of would-be immigrants and asylum seekers, mostly from Central America — have not been reunited with their parents and may never see their families again.
These are not among the nearly 3,000 families separated at the border in 2018, when children were kept in cages like animals or shipped away to facilities across the country, hundreds or thousands of miles from the border. We now know, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union and other pro bono lawyers, that an additional 1500 children were torn away from their families beginning in 2017, when the Trump administration conducted a trial run of the separation policy.
In the Bible, administrative brutality comes from a king who fears a new “king of the Jews,” predicted by the wise men. When they don’t reveal identity of the child, he engages in wholesale slaughter. The Rachel in this passage is a stand-in for Jewish mothers:
Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.
Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, “In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”
It’s worth noting that Joseph and Mary save Jesus only by becoming refugees themselves. Fortunately for them, Egypt does not have Trumpian border policies.
In Moby Dick, the captain of the Rachel has lost his 12-year-old son in a whaling incident and asks Captain Ahab that the Pequod “unite with his own [ship] in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five miles apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping a double horizon, as it were.” The ship the commands is the Rachel.
“We must save that boy,” exclaims third mate Stubb upon hearing the story. Ahab, however, exhibit a Trumpian “iciness” as he turns down the captain’s request:
Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before.”
As the ships go their own ways, the sailors aboard the Pequod watch the Rachel
yaw hither and thither at every dark spot, however small, on the sea. This way and that her yards were swung round; starboard and larboard, she continued to tack; now she beat against a head sea; and again it pushed her before it; while all the while, her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.
But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.
It so happens that one man benefits from the Rachel’s search. Ishmael, kept afloat by Queequeeg’s coffin, becomes the one rescued orphan:
Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.
With no help from the Trump administration, the ACLU and other organizations have been tirelessly working to reunite these Trump-created orphans with their families, although the pandemic has interrupted their efforts. At times, the search seems as hopeless as the Rachel’s. We will never be able to undo all the damage that has been done.
