There are children in cages.
Yes, you read that right. Children. In cages.
This is not a history lesson or an Oscar winning drama. Tom Hanks is not coming to save the day. 
There are children in cages, in tents in 100 degree Texas heat because racism.
Because capitalism. Because colonialism never really went away. Manifest Destiny hid itself under a white cloak and a red flag and it calls itself Republican.
There are babies who miss their mamas but are too young to have any idea what has happened. They just miss that familiar smell and sound of her voice and can’t. Stop. Crying.
A father who killed himself when he couldn’t stop the separation.
Thousands of children torn from their parent’s arms after fleeing violence and ruin at home, believing in that American dream, that beautiful statue of Lady Liberty that says:
“Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses, yearning to be free.”
And they put them in cages.
When I try to imagine, just for a moment, what those parents are going through, I could bite iron and spit nails. A howling rage rises up, instinctive and feral, unapologetic, and it says “NO. YOU WILL NOT HAVE THEM. THEY ARE MINE. MINE TO LOVE. PROTECT. GO AWAY NOW. DO NOT INTERFERE.”
We are charged with their care and raising so we do our best. Sometimes our best is breakfast for dinner or yelling when we don’t mean too or being too tired to play another game of hide and seek.
Sometimes doing your best is packing up your family and fleeing your home with whatever you can carry, walking for weeks through jungles or deserts while people who want you dead bomb or burn your house and make your neighbours disappear.
Sometimes doing your best is chasing a dream sold around the world in the flashiest gold packaging when it’s as cheap as a carnival prize, but you have to try.
There are children behind iron bars and in tender age shelters and the streets of America are not filled with the howling rage of millions. The bars have not been broken. The food and blankets and workers still come and go.
“I would go, but I can’t miss work.”
”I would go but it’s too far.”
”Don’t try to make me feel bad for those kids, their parent’s shouldn’t have broken the law.”
”Fix your own country before you come here!”
”Child actors!”
”It’s like summer camp. The kids are well cared for.”
People captivated and divided by the system so deeply they can’t even fight it.
Never again is now. The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984 were not instruction manuals. Rise and march now. Millions of people united for the love of children cannot be stopped.
If we can’t do this, if we allow it to continue, we are no better than those who shut the cage doors in person.
