3/4/22

By Josh Rubin

We see pictures now, video too, that helps us know the pain of families separating. These pictures travel across from Eastern Europe, across the more prosperous West, cross the ocean, and lap up on the shores of our consciousness.

Circumstances well beyond the control of these people, pawns in a game whose rules are so obscure that even those with their hands on the queens and kings have no idea of its endgame. We look at trains, at oozing throngs of humanity. Babies passed from hand to hand, eyes red from crying but dry from exhaustion. Long, slow slogs along tracks that make us think, when we don’t want to think, about the boxcars of a history that will never pass.

Less distant are the images of people also wrenched from their homes who appear at borders to our south, similar, but a different skin shade, families torn from each other’s arms by circumstances outside the sphere of their control. Spun loose, raggedly torn apart.

If you can’t save me, save my children.