small is how the world is healed...

Over the past week, more and more people in the USA have expressed anguish, anger, and astonishment over the forced separation of innocent children from their migrant parents who were seeking entrance at our Southern border. As fact checkers have noted, it is not a felony to attempt to enter the USA illegally. It is a misdemeanor. Given the Trump/Sessions/Miller policy of moving a minor crime from immigration courts to the jurisdiction of federal Marshals - the so-called 0% tolerance for any immigration violation - our nation now weaponizes children to inflame Trump's political base. (NOTE: check the facts here @ https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/immigrants-rights-and-detention/fact-checking-family-separation?redirect=blog/fact-checking-family-separation)

That means in 6 weeks, we have incarcerated nearly 2,000 children in wire cages. This has now been condemned by everyone from the US Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops, Republican senators Cruz and McCain as well as four former First Ladies of the US (Carter, Clinton, Bush and Obama.) Still, the current regime has cynically and cruelly stated that their hands are tied and they are only enforcing the law. This lie plays to their nativist, often racist and paranoid political supporters, but it officially makes child abuse the law of the land.

As this horror unfolds in public, two competing truths have been wrestling in my heart: first, this barbarism clearly disgusts and angers all people of conscience. Barbara Ehrenriech has written: The sound of a baby crying leads to hard-wired responses of pain and alarm in adults. The sound of 2000 babies crying can lead, when suitably amplified, to revolution. Our collective reaction is authentic. Such action is not who America wants to be in the 21st century.. At the same time, I have a second - perhaps contradictory - sense that such racist activity is part of our political DNA. We may hate it in 2018, but for most of our history we have denied it by white washing our true history from the annihilation of First Nations people to slavery, Jim Crow and the school to prison pipeline.

Not long ago one of my colleagues for justice said tome, "What you white liberals are experiencing in the US under Trump is America's shadow unveiled.. something people of color have known and experienced forever." He is right. So much of our collective anger, fear, inertia and/or exhaustion is a dying to privilege. It IS costly. And unnerving. Painful, too. I trust that from our shared pain we can find the courage to challenge the wounds of racism, sexism, environmental greed, homophobia and classism with solidarity as sisters and brothers of true humility. I believe that Valerie Kaur and William Barber are both right: birthing a new world is messy, loud and painful. It is going to be a tough birth - but well worth it - as new ways of being together take shape and form among us. I pray that the angst so many Americans are feeling and expressing over the treatment of migrant children forcibly ripped apart from their parents is a part of a new America. 

The disgust and confusion so many of us are experiencing right now has to do with powerlessness. For so long, white privilege has trained us to believe we are masters of our destiny. The Trump election smashed that illusion. It is a psychic and cultural death - and all deaths are traumatic. My deepest prayer is that as America's churches and civic groups rise up in compassion that we reclaim a sacred perspective: small is holy. Small is how compassion grows. Small is how we stay grounded to love and experience joy. Small is where we can make a difference. Small is the only place we have any real control. So let's honor it and nourish it. Small is beautiful. And small is where all that is holy breaks into our shared humanity and makes us whole.