Language is a wonderful thing. With it we communicate information; we share feelings; we ask questions; we offer comfort, we express outrage.
When speaking to classes of middle school students about writing, I have always posed the question, "What do you think my favorite book is?" Answers inevitably include Harry Potter! The latest mystery! Or some boring, but legendary tome like War & Peace. They are always surprised when I tell them my favorite book is the dictionary.
Yes, the dictionary.
My reason? Because it contains every story ever written, every story yet to be written. Familiar words, words we already know, just waiting to be strung together in a new way to communicate with an audience. Maybe someone will create an adventure and sweep us away. Perhaps the next sonnet is waiting to land on someone's keyboard. Someone could be writing the next Top 40 ear worm. A storyteller is crafting next year's summer blockbuster. Or someone like me is sitting at her computer, searching for the words that will help process the latest news and what it has done to her gut.
Since the advent of MAGAtry, I have plumbed the depths to find adequate ways to describe the horrors of this administration. I have worn out the thesaurus. I have even worn letters off my keyboard.
When Trump was heard bragging about grabbing pussy, I used words like misogynist, molester, pig.
With every incoherent bowl of word slop (salad is far too generous), I called him daft, a dolt, intellectually incurious, a fact rapist with a stupidity boner.
As he ramped up attacks on group after group, I used words like dangerous, bigoted, racist.
When he started sanctioning the ripping of children from their parent's arms and being locked in cages, words like venal, heinous, and vile poured forth.
He openly flouts things like the emoluments clause, enriching himself along the way. He golfs at a cost of millions of tax dollars. Words like corrupt, lazy, grifting have been used repeatedly by me
As he had cavorted with dictators I have employed words like treasonous, ignorant, unpatriotic.
When he smiled and gave a thumbs up as Melania held the orphaned El Paso baby of the parents he had a hand in murdering through his vile, inciting rhetoric, I called it vomitous, horrific, an abomination.
My descriptors for the man himself have included Tangerine Taint, cocksplat, Hefty bag filled with grift and chicken grease, corpulent, an outhouse, a decomposing gourd, someone who should have been a stain on a mattress..
With each new outrage, I struggle to capture what I am feeling, what we are feeling. But with this week's revelation that he and his minions have notified foreigners, here in the states seeking life saving treatments for their children, that they have 33 days to leave?
Well, I am running out of words.
When the news broke, my heart, my brain would not believe it for a moment. Even knowing how rancid is this cabal of soulless miscreants, I simply could not believe even they would stoop so low. Even while children still sit in cages, separated from their parents, I did not want to believe this could be true. But it is.
We are now a country sentencing children to death because they are from somewhere else. Oh, and they are most likely brown.
Take Mariela Sanchez for instance. She is a Honduran mother who already lost a daughter to cystic fibrosis in her country. She brought her family here to the states and applied for deferred action so her 16-year-old son Jonathan could be treated for it. He has been receiving treatment for two years now. “He would be dead,” if they had remained in Honduras, she told the AP of her son. “I have panic attacks over this every day.”
They received the letter telling them to leave. They received the letter that literally sentences another of her children to death. His only crime? He is ill and his skin is brown.
Children will be evicted from hospital beds and deported, their life saving treatments ripped from their arms, the masks from their faces, the hope from their hearts. They will die. Their parents will watch them in agony, will watch them fade to black. Helpless.
I am sickened. I am ashamed. This country, once a beacon to the rest of the world; once a symbol of hope, promise, opportunity, is now just a broken down, seedy motel with crusty sheets, bloodstains on the carpet, skidmarks in the leaky toilet, and a neon sign blinking NO VACANCY.
As story after story like Jonathan's has been brought to the fore over the past few days - parents of these sick children terrified because they have been handed a certain death sentence for their child, my mother's heart has broken. And I did not think there was any left to break.
Look at your children. If they are healthy, running around, driving you crazy - count your fucking blessings. Now, imagine if one of them had cystic fibrosis, a rare cancer, a blood disease, muscular dystrophy. Imagine you lived in a place where access to the kind of live saving treatments for your child's affliction were not offered. But the doctors they need, the care they require, the chance to live that they deserve could be found in the United States.
What would you do?
Rhetorical question. I hope.
If you are a decent parent, a person with a heart, a soul, a singular purpose to protect your child, you would move heaven, hell, and across this earth to try to save their life.
While the numbers of immigrants currently here in the States seeking treatments for their children is uncertain, what is unquestionable are the letters these parents have been receiving telling them they have 33 days to GTFO of the states. That the medical deferred action for which they have applied and been approved is being revoked; that the humanity our government once had is gone; that the devil and his immigrant hating coven have decided your child's life is of no importance to them; that your child is expendable - anything to lighten up the Uwhited Stated of America.
This is not hyperbole to make a point. Their stories are not exaggerated for effect. The letters are real. The consequences to these children are real. Their deaths will be real.
I cannot process that this is our country, that this is how we are treating sick children. That this is how inhuman we have become.
Yet here we are. Held hostage by an unfeeling, unthinking, zero empathy, heartless, bigoted stooge who makes Mr. Potter from Wonderful Life seem Christ-like.
And make no mistake, just as with the children in cages, the lives lost and the inevitable deaths yet to come at the hands of our complete inaction over gun accessibility, the dangers experienced daily by immigrants, Muslims, black people, brown people, LGBTQIA people, Jewish people in this country - we are all complicit. This is on all of us.
The shame, the horrified gaze of the world upon us, the ownership we must take as these fragile children are deported back to their medically deficient countries - this is on us all - this is all done in our name.
I have watched as citizens around the globe have filled the streets in their countries, coming together in outrage, passion, conviction to oust corrupt leaders, fight for their rights, their freedoms. Millions of people willing to give their time, their energy, their voices to force change.
Then I look at us. Shocked, open mouthed, outraged, disgusted, rage-filled. All the same feelings of those citizens, yet we act impotent. Then I look at our streets. Empty. Are we truly that lost, that hopeless, that weary, that willing to accept the horrors? Or are we just that lazy?
Congress is not going to save us. The Senate is a neuter institution where bills passed by Congress go to die, and where Republicans have surrendered their spines to the god of power and grift.
WE are the ones we are waiting for. WE have the power to unite. WE outnumber the hateful, shitful, mouthbreathing MAGAtry. WE are capable of sacrifice.
But we need to hurry.
Real people are dying at our border. Real people will be lost in yet another mass shooting. Real children are being sentenced to die horrific deaths because they dare to have brown skin and be from somewhere else.
We must ask ourselves "If not now, when? If not us, who?"
We know the answers. We just have to come together and move. The clock is ticking.
And I am running out of words.
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