Barbarity U.S.A

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
~ Paul Gauguin

Let’s not sugar coat this – America has a long history of barbarism.

* In the days of legal (!!*@#!!) enslavement of our brown and black skinned fellow HUMAN BEINGS, slave children were taken away from their enslaved parents. Husbands and wives were sold separately (NO assembly required!). Young girls, (CHILDREN!) especially the ones rockin’ a lighter shade of flesh-tone were taken from their mothers and sold off as concubines and prostitutes.

* And there was, in 1942, the Executive Order 9066 which "relocated" Japanese Americans to “internment camps” (AKA concentration camps) where they lived in tar-paper barracks, fairground cowsheds and horse stalls. Yeah, way posh, fine digs, no?

Two Women ~ Paul Gauguin

Actor George Takei, born here in the U.S. of A., spent three years there – from age five until he was eight

…my father told us that we were going on a long vacation to a place called Arkansas. It was an adventure. I thought everyone took vacations by leaving home in a railroad car with sentries, armed soldiers at both ends of the car, sitting on wooden benches. And whenever we approached a town, we were forced to draw the curtains, the shade. We were not supposed to be seen by the people out there. We thought that was the way things happened. We saw people crying, you know, and we thought, "Well, why are they crying? Daddy said we're going on a vacation." So we were innocent children. When we arrived at Rohwer, in the swamps of Arkansas, there were these barb wire fences and sentry towers. (source)

* Also, let’s totally not forget the Native American children, some as young as 5, taken from their families and brought to government-run boarding schools. This practice began in the 1860’s and continued as official policy for a hundred years.

On January 22, 1818, the House Committee on Indian Affairs reported that Indian children “will grow up in habits of morality and industry…and become useful members of society” if they are given ‘the primer…the hoe…”and the Bible.  By 1879 off-reservation schools were created to separate Indian children from their families, culture, language, sacred history, and territory to “kill the Indian…and save the man.” These schools not only “educated” Indian children, they put them to work in a mandated trade craft which, coincidentally, generated profits for the school system. (source)

Hail Mary ~ Paul Gauguin

A 1974 study by Association of American Indian Affairs, reported that 35 percent of all Indian children had been taken from their families “placed in adoptive families, foster care, or institutions.” 90% were placed in non-Indian homes because OF COURSE THEY WERE. That was the whole bloody point!

And this is STILL going on (if at a lesser rate). Indian Country Today reports that in Pennington County, South Dakota, the state has removed more than 1,000 children from their Native American families since 2010.

If you can stomach it, go read the article at the link.

So then, what’s happening now down at the border – that it’s official policy to rip children away from parents – is, horrifically, nothing new. What MAY be different this time around is that we’ve got the Internet AND major news orgs reporting the atrocities. MAYBE we can stop this shit from continuing by voting, voting, voting in November. Do it before this heinously criminal administration makes it illegal.

Here’s something more that furiously rankles – these border patrol skeevoids who are doing the actual physical separations, the thefts of children from parents, the severance of husbands and wives – I wanna know how they can live with themselves. This is flat out evil shit. These monsters are just following orders — that makes them every bit as egregiously, viciously horrible as the bantam brained, Richie Rich xenophobes in D.C. who’re giving the orders.

Stop by Ten Bears place today. He nails it.

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
~ George Bernard Shaw