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Thursday
The Trump administration is not only building concentration camps but celebrating them with associated merchandise. By calling its newly constructed Florida prison “Alligator Alcatraz,” it seeks to make a joke out of human misery. Meanwhile, the stories that are emerging from those incarcerated are horrific.
As CBS-Miami’s Anna McAllister’s reported, and as Ana Ceballos , Alex Harris and Claire Healy of the Miami Herald confirmed in separate reporting, there are toilets that don’t flush, temperatures that fluctuate from freezing to sweltering, giant mosquitoes, little or no access to bathing facilities, and no confidential calls with attorneys. Inmates have reported maggots in the food and lights that are never turned off. Some of the prisoners have residency documents and don’t know why they are there.
To be clear, the concentration camps are not death camps. Then again, the German concentration camps were not death camps at first. They just evolved into the Final Solution as the population became accustomed to their government’s brutality. At times I sense that the Trump administration, starting with his Jewish advisor Stephen Miller, has taken lessons from the Nazis in how to acculturate a population to cruelty.
While I do not apply Elie Wiesel’s famous poem about the Holocaust directly to Alligator Alcatraz, I share it as a warning of what depths a civilized people can descend to. The current inmates of the Trump concentration camps will certainly “never forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed”:
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never.
Evil is being committed in our name.
