Our Trail of Tears

From 1830 to1850, the United States relocated once-proud Native American tribes from their ancestral Southeastern homes to “reservations” west of the Mississippi. 

As many as a quarter of some tribes perished en route, and the songs of the survivors referred to the atrocity as the “Trail of Tears.” Many children, weakened by the travails of the trail, simply died, and their mothers' wailing was the dirge of the journey.

America is little better today. An immigrant child of four months was taken from his parents. Four months. Whose arms took this infant, and where did those arms carry it? Was there love in those arms, or were they the inflexible bureaucratic claws of a “matron”? The child was ultimately returned to his parents, but at 20 months the child has not tried to walk or talk.

There are 14,000 children stashed throughout the Great Prison that America has become. We have more people under  lock and key – 2.2 million – than any country in the world, totalitarian states included.

Actually, we have been kinder in some ways to the immigrants grabbed at our Southern border than we were to America's first citizens. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” was the mantra of the likes of George Custer, slaughterer of whole Native American villages, before he himself was massacred – and canonized as an American hero. 

Our kindness to the immigrant children has manifested itself in cages, sexual assault, lack of health care, and – most evil – a careless shrug by the Trump administration that literally thousands of children are unaccounted for and may never see their parents or families again. 

Here's what Trump's kidnappers say about the conditions of the child prisons: Matthew Albence, who later became head of ICE, testified before Congress that the detention centers are like “summer camps.” When asked if he would send his own children to such a camp, he said the question wasn't applicable. Laura Ingraham, that racist witch, jumped right on that and smirked “summer camp” all over Fox. 

In America, it's still “if you ain't white, you ain't right.” Since slavery, we have felt entitled to separate children of another color from their parents, and in the case of Native Americans, to declare actual war and thus justify the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent women and children. My Lai was no accident of history. It had its antecedents on the plains and in the hills of our Great March West. 

There is a significant percentage of Americans to whom the kidnapping and in some cases the death of innocent children is inconsequential, if it is even thought about.

Donald Trump knows that for much of his base, all they have is being white. And it is the button he not so subtly pushes with every “fine people” quote.

To them, Trump has verified their racism, institutionalized it, glorified it.  

Our Trail of Tears traces its way through the American psyche, and its sorrowing path is lined with MAGA hats.