MAKING AMERICA AMERICA AGAIN

Mexican baby

Guanajato baby and mother

I have not posted this blog for the past two weeks, at first because I was on a photo trip to Mexico and then because I couldn’t bring myself to write about the vagaries of daily life while children are being wrenched away from their parents at the United States border.  It is impossible to imagine how people who have children of their own—that would be the president and presumably most of his defenders—can be so cruel and un-American. I remember well how, after I gave birth to my first child, I was shocked at how much I loved her.  I hadn’t known I was capable of loving someone that much. Now I imagine how those mothers and fathers must feel when they are told their children are being taken way “for baths” and they have not seen or heard from them since.  For many, I am afraid, they may never be reunited.  How can we do this to other human beings?  This is not making America great. This is making America vicious and shameful.

Funny Face in Guanajuato

Little boy making a funny face for the camera.

I am including three photos I have taken in the past two weeks.  Two are of children in Mexico—not vermin, not infesters but children of loving, hard-working parents much like most Americans.  The third photo I took from a BART commuter train.  If you look carefully, you can see an Asian woman, an African-American woman and several men, one of whom—Hispanic—is studying a book that prepares people for taking the Graduate Record Exam.  This mix is what I love about America, not the dehumanization we are seeing at the border.

Mix of races on BART.

BART train passengers–immigrants all.

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About Alexis

Alexis Rankin Popik, author of Kiss Me Over the Garden Gate, is an award-winning short story writer whose work has appeared in The Berkshire Review and Potpourri Magazine. She has penned numerous articles about local history that have been published in Connecticut Explored and the University of Connecticut School of Law and The Hartford Seminary publications. A former union organizer, Popik traveled the country educating shipyard workers about health and safety and founded a labor-management health plan before turning to writing fiction full-time. She lives with her husband in New England.
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