My stomach has been in knots, and I have been feeling sick all day. My emotions are maxed out, my brain is static, my heart conflicted and confused. I say it often, but I mean it when I talk about loving people. Sometimes, though, the people I love do terrible things, and it breaks my heart.
Generally, I deal with this by compartmentalizing everything, and work it out over time, but between what has been happening in the U.S. regarding our government’s willingness to tear immigrant children from their families and lock them in cages as they send their parents to prisons, and just the stress of every day life, it has left my stomach tumbling and my heart fracturing as it all spills over into other compartments.
I have to be careful when this happens, because I tend to enter a form of fight or flight mode, where I either have to lock my mind down from everything and go numb, or step up and try to do something.
Unfortunately, I am not in the position to do what I really want to do and haul my ass down to these detention centers and break all of those kids out and reunite them with their folks. I would absolutely do it if I could. I don’t give two shits about whether it’s legal or not, because I do what I believe is the right thing to do if it means saving and protecting other lives.
So instead I am having to champ at the bit, and only make phone calls, send emails, spread the word, and so forth, and it just feels inadequate. I would much rather get a bus, head on down there and do some real good, because our system is clearly too corrupt to give a damn, and there are far too many citizens who feel this is business as usual and acceptable, if not good.
Some people say “I understand protecting borders” but I honestly don’t anymore. What is it we’re protecting? A government that blithely does what it wants to whomever it wants if they are deemed undesirable, and then tosses out a half assed lie claiming some kind of danger from these migrants and refugees? Fuck that. That’s not a system or a nation worth protecting. If it were up to me, I would abolish borders and boundaries, but I realize that I am an outlier in that regard.
When we start caging children, separating families, denying human beings medical care, letting innocents go hungry, and invading the lives of people who have done us no harm, just what the hell is the border actually worth?