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While Children Are Still In Cages

America, what are you doing today?

While children are still in cages here in your country, what are you doing?

While daughters torn from their father’s arms and infant sons pulled from their mothers’ breasts are waiting?

While terrified toddlers scream at the unfathomable, instant removal of all they understand as love and safety and peace?

While parents live inside the nightmare of losing that which is most precious in this life?

After thousands of families are ripped apart, not by war or flood or disease but by your elected leaders in the richest country in the world?

With all hell breaking loose here in the Land of the Free—what in the hell are you doing right now?

Are you seeking a way to rationalize it all away?
Are you trying to shield yourself behind a flimsy Scripture verse?
Are you telling yourself an ever shifting story that somehow makes it acceptable?
Are you sequestering yourself in the fortified bunker of your politics?

Are you quickly clicking past the pictures in your timeline to something more palatable?
Are you moving your gaze past it all, as if that makes you not responsible?

You are responsible.

You know this is happening.
That makes you culpable for what happens now.
It makes you the keeper of every child laying alone in nondescript cots covered by silver blankets.
It makes you the bystander to a homegrown human rights emergency designed specifically by this Presidency to do the greatest harm to the most vulnerable.
It makes you witness to the irreparable emotional wounds of parents without voice or capacity or their children.
It makes you completely aware of politicians and preachers you’ve previously endorsed, proving they lack a basic working level of compassion for humanity.

It makes you fully complicit in it all if you stay silent now.

That’s the beauty and the hazard in the middle of such abject madness: you get to choose. You get to be animated by the urgency of the moment into vocal and passionate resistance—or you do nothing and you declare your consent to every bit of it.

These are the only options now.
You’re out of real estate to hedge upon.
There is no fence to sit comfortably on.
There is no safe middle ground left to stake out.
You’re either driven to sickness by the violation to family and child and community—or you’re at peace with it.
You either exercise your professed faith or your deny it fully.
You’re either truly “pro-life,” or you should abandon the phrase forever because it’s a lie as it leaves your lips.

You extend liberty to everyone, or you prove your Patriotism is largely ceremonial.
You tangibly move to defend the inalienable rights of every human being—or you declare that these words are of little consequence to you.

History is recording these moments, and yes they are clarifying who we are as a nation, but they are illuminating something far deeper, something much closer than that. They are a mirror to you and to me, revealing in great detail the harshly lit truth of our own hearts that we are forced to reckon with.

This is why our response isn’t just about writing a country’s history—it’s about crafting our personal legacy. I wonder what yours will be.

Yes, while children are still in cages here in America, we are finding out what kind of nation America is and will be. We will find out in the hours and days and weeks to come. We will find out in the voting booth in 2020.

But while children are in cages, you are finding out what kind of human being you are, friend.

I hope you can live with what you’re discovering.

 

Order John’s forthcoming book ‘HOPE AND OTHER SUPERPOWERS” here!

 

 

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