It has been quite a while, so I am not confident if it was Bus number 5 or Bus number 6, but, during my past experiences in Jewish Communal work, I had the opportunity to supervise the Day Camp program. I still recall, the angst, as the end of the day camp, schedule was looming large, and it was time for the campers to return either to their homes or the JCC. And there was always one bus which either was late, always seemed to have some kind of mechanical difficulty or for some reason a driver with no sense of direction. Typically, on a hot humid Houston summers afternoon, back in the day, I would stand in front of our building, greeting each of the buses as they pulled up the driveway, give high fives to the campers, pat my day camp counselors on the back, be reminded by a few parents of concerns of even praises. And I would, in the hottest, most humid hours of the day, wait for all 9 buses to return, all having dropped off each and every camper, hoping that for that day, everyone had a great time. And for that day, EVERYONE had returned safely to his or her home. Often times either Bus 5 or Bus 6, would find some unplanned exasperating reason for NOT returning in a reasonable time, and my hot afternoon, became longer, and my sweat was so high it felt like I was taking a shower in a smelly, salty, splash of frustration. We never lost a kid, all kids were accounted for, problems were solved, at least until a new one developed, but each day all kids came home and by the end of the summer, all campers met their parents, and I could put away my bullhorn and sigh a very loud SIGH of relief.
There are still some 700 children, who had been abducted, kidnapped, grabbed from their families by a maniac sitting in the White House. His use of his own form of Gestapo type tactics and his own private army of SS like soldiers who are MISSING, GONE, almost as if they have evaporated, who for months now have no been reunited with their families. Children whose only crime was to try and come to America, to lead behind the barbaric, brutal, and bullying behavior of their countries of origin, to try and find a better life. Detention centers aka prisons, deportation zones aka prisons, were established by OUR GOVERNMENT because, a paranoid man named Stephen Miller, angry at the world for his own self-inflicted deep-rooted self-hatred, became the Immigrant Whisperer. He works for a demented, depraved, easily swayed shallow fool man named Donald Trump who played on xenophobia, and racism to assure a segment of his cult-like followers (who need a scapegoat to feel better about themselves), that keeping kids from their parents, and eventually creating orphans from most is as red white and blue as it gets.
Each day, each moment and each Tweet brings about even more disgusting news about the conditions of this nation. That, and the mental illness of its Commander-In-Chief causes each news cycle to be filled with so much to worry about, we sometimes forget, the small things, like clean water in Flint, tax breaks that trickled up, the war against divide of church and state. But for me, until each and every child is reunited with his or her family…and each and every child kidnapped is provided meant and physical health care for the trauma they received but did not deserve, I feel compelled to SCREAM about the shame of it all! I remember the sense of a fog hanging over my head in the summer, when all I had to worry about was all of my day camp busses arriving home, having delivering ALL of my campers to their families. I can not even fathom the emotions of the missing children and their families after this amount of time. None of us should stop demanding that each and every child be returned!
