Dear Melania...

Dear Melania—

Since you wrote me a letter the other day—I thought I would respond. You began your letter: “Dear Mr. Lovette, 

          Decisions made by the President of the United States impact countless lives across our nation and throughout the world

          From the moment my husband, Donald, placed his hand on the Bible and took the oath of office to serve as America’s 45th President, he has worked nonstop to deliver on his promise to Make America Great Again.”

Well Melania, I don’t believe I will be sending you a check.  I cannot understand how you can sleep at night, with your son, Barron in another room safe and sound—and at our Southern border little children cry for their parents, for enough to eat, for someone to hold them. Many do not know where their parents are. And across the country children have been snatched from their parents and sent to places where many of their parents cannot find them. 

Back at the border men and women old and young are penned behind chain-link fences. Your husband has tried to tell us that we have to “protect the border” from rapists, drug dealers sex trafficers. Most of the people—and by the way they really are people. They have names and many of them came thousands of miles to find a place called America where they might be safe and they had always heard this was a land that would really care for them. Most, if not all of them are dirt poor. The only thing some of them have are their children for them to be taken from them must be horrifying indeed.

Mrs.Trump this does not make America great. It joins a whole line of countries that do not care for people who are in desperate circumstances. The Bible your husband put his hand on that day he was inaugurated has a lot to say about how we treat the stranger and aliens. 

But there is another reason I cannot respond too your request. On this Sunday, which we Christians call the Lord’s Day ICE will send out troops all over the country to knock down doors, drag some parents away from their homes, splitting couples This is done under your husband’s direction. And as we  Christians sing our songs and say our prayers all over America there will be people living in utter fear. They came rot this country to escape from fear. And America on her better days has never engendered fear in the hers arts of ordinary people. Notice I did not say citizens. The Constitution does not use this term. 

I weep this Lord’s Day when what we are doing with undocumented immigrants is beyond belief. There are a lot of reasons I cannot support the re-election of your husband. He is shredding the decent things that have made America the shining light on a hill for multitudes. 

So I must deny your request for money.

I have closen a Facebook piece by Hania Thomas-Adams. She is a pediatric pre-op Child Life Specialist at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, Oakland, California. She knows the damage that we re doing to children who may never recover emotionally from what the United States is doing to them. Read it and weep.

Hania Thomas-Adams

June 19, 2018 ·

“I regularly see young children separated from their parents. It is one of the hardest parts of working in a surgical environment. We go to great lengths to make it less traumatic for them, including medications, transitional objects, putting the parents in head to toe covering so they can stay with their child, showing the kids exactly where Mommy will be waiting for them, and forming relationships with the kids days in advance so they have someone that they trust to carry them in. Even so, it is always difficult and frequently terrifying for the children. In those cases we sing, we rock, we make promise after promise that Daddy will be right back, and we go as fast as we can. It is a significant portion of my job, and all of this is done to limit the disorganizing fear and effects of being separated from caregivers for less than three minutes.

Today there was a little one who I carried in to an OR and who had to be pried off her mother. I saw the screaming and the reaching and the "mommy mommy" and the feral terror that takes over small children in these situations. I repeated over and over in her ear that her mother would be right back, I rocked her, I wondered out loud with her whether Mommy would ride the elevator to come see her and what color popsicle she would choose for herself and for Mommy. She calmed down a little but not much and we went as fast as we could. After she was asleep I walked back out of the OR and had to hold on to the wall.

I can't stop thinking about those children at (the) border who can't find their parents and the parents who can't find their children. It is not kind or fast for them and there are no promises of coming back soon. I feel so helpless beyond writing and calling and I feel myself being drawn toward despair one minute and all out anarchy the next. There's been this terrible subtle process where I've become gradually overwhelmed even as I am realizing that, yes, this is truly evil if the word means anything at all, and yes, it's being done by my country and my tax dollars. Please everyone write and please call and please, please vote as soon and as often as you can.”

On this Sunday I lift up all the children of the world. Maybe Jesus had in mind children of all ages. If we open the book we call the Bible we cannot look away from the evil which is perpetrated on many people even as we sing to Jesus this day.

(I took the two photographs of people who gathered March 28, 2015 to stand with the Dreamers who were trying to finish their educations and get a job in this country. This is July 14, 2019 and the status of the Dreamers is still in limbo.)

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com