Refugees La Sagrada Familia
“Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me … the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” David Foster Wallace
No loving mother would ever risk coming to America if it meant they might be separated from their child at the border.
No loving mother would risk crossing a river with their child if they didn’t know how to swim.
No loving mother would risk dying of exposure or dehydration by dragging their child for days through the desert.
No loving mother would ever jump on a moving train with their child in tow, only to ride on the top of the train with a child so young.
Yet loving mothers do these very things every day.
Imagine a ten-story building was consumed with fire. Would you be morally indignant if you saw a mother clutching her young child as she leaped from the 10th floor of the burning building? Would you ask, how could she put that child in such danger? No of course not. You would pity that poor mother and her heartbreaking ordeal. Though she does not need pity, she needs someone to catch her and her baby.
This is the predicament that countless parents in Latin America are dealing with every day. Their home countries are figuratively on fire. Whether that fire is violent gangs, abject poverty, or murderous drug cartels. They have two choices, stay and wait for the day the gang comes for their child, or the cartel takes over their community or to leap for America with the hope that their child will have a better chance.
For reasons unbeknownst to me, this has become a left versus right issue. We are living in prosperous times in a “Christian” nation. If you profess to be a Christian, how can you stay quiet? Are the dictates of your party more important than the dictates of your bible? If we are silent when children are locked in cages, separated from their families, are we not guilty of negligence? Does our stance of being a pro-life stop at birth or just the border?
If we are Christians, we worship a refugee whose mother knew that if she stayed in her home country her child would surely be killed. Yet… how quickly we blame the Central American refugees that seek safety on our soil. How quick we are to blame the mother and child jumping from the burning building when we should be the ones trying to catch them.
Christians, I implore you. Say something… your silence is deafening.