That’s right, we are now imprisoning children, forcing them to wear jail uniforms and identity badges. Land of the Free.
Not to worry, though. The imprisoned children do get instruction daily; if you count one hour of English as actual instruction. They also get, out the goodness of Chertoff’s black heart, one half hour of recreational activity, indoors, daily.
Even infants have to wear identity badges. Home of the Brave.
Who is running these dens of horror?
How many children do we have incarcerated?
Why did Chertoff set up these jails that incarcerate children? Why, out of his deep concern for families that are sometimes split up when one or more adults is jailed, they are all jailed together.
Well, they are accomplishing that goal – to the exclusion of being allowed any outside contact with the rest of the world, aside from those who have lawyers.
The children are loosing weight and there are rampant psychological problems among the detainees, most of whom were seeking asylum in the US from nightmarish situations in their countries of origin before being tossed into US prison camps.
There will be a Christmas Eve Vigil at Hutto Children’s Jail “on Dec 24, from 5-6pm, across from the entrance of the Hutto prison camp. “
I tried, I really tried to find some happy feel good stories since it is the season to be jolly. This is what the US has become: we put babies in jail.
One last thought: Michael Chertoff is a monster devoid of human compassion. Come to think of it, so is his boss, who reminded us all a few days ago to go shopping.
Chertoff really is a strange figure, with those sunken eyes and lack of emotion. He seems to be an apt representative of the far right. I constantly wonder how we’ve sunk so low. Far right conservatives don’t seem to be burdened with the ability for human empathy and thus seem able to slip into abject cruelty without the bat of an eye.
Keep those babies and children and families in your prayers. My heart is broken… again.
Imo, what disables the capacity for empathy is objectification of the Other, the reduction of actual human beings to the abstract.
This is possible on both personal & cultural levels & seems manifest in every type of man-made human suffering I can think of.
What better personification of this type of willful ignorance than an utter ghoul like Chertoff.
Americans are very, very unfortunate now that a cadre of immoral monstrosities are now in charge of our apparent ‘governance’ & also our representatives on the world stage.
On this basis, how can widespread animosity against the American people be shocking?
Thanks for the post, Nag.
“Imo, what disables the capacity for empathy is objectification of the Other, the reduction of actual human beings to the abstract.“
That, and the glorification of the self. You put that so well. I think about this stuff all the time. When our leaders are incapable of the basic human emotion of empathy, that makes absolutely any horror not only possible, but something they can legislate.
Besides objectifying those who are different into an other, they do the same to themselves — they see themselves as not like the majority of humans but in fact smarter, stronger, wiser, and ironically, more moral — all of which gives them the right to make decisions for the good of us all. Anyone who disagrees simply lacks the wisdom to recognize their obvious superiority. It’s a logic that been around for a long time, doing service to justify fighting wars, persecuting those of other religious beliefs, enslaving people, annihilating indigenous populations, etc.
I think it’s a sickness. A personality disorder. Not all those afflicted are right wing conservatives, but most right wing conservatives seem to have it.
I’d like to think it was sickness because then we could think about a cure but I think it is very organic — resulting from a very complex stew of genetics, upbringing (particularly where it is authoritarian/patriarchal), and circumstance.
You’re exactly right, and most people afflicted with that mindset are probably unreachable. The most frightening thing is that the White House is full of them.
Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart for writing this very important story up. I have been sitting in front of my screen for hours trying to write something about it and just cannot it do it.
I think I really so broken hearted and deeply disturbed to really write something about this. Estas son mi gente.
Thank you for giving a voice to those who have been drowned out by the cold-hearted……
Xicano, I think that many of us share that broken heart of yours. The pain is real and it is sometimes debilitating for me as well.
The trick is not to fight those heartaches. It’s what makes us human. When your heart is full of care for another human being, there’s no room for hatred, even of those who commit these horrors.
This is all making it harder and harder to contain this huge scream I feel building up inside…”HOW CAN THIS KIND OF THING BE GOING ON IN MY OWN COUNTRY AND WHY THE HELL AREN’T WE ALL ON THE STREETS STORMING WASHINGTON, DC?”
(I know, I know, it’s time for me to take a news break before my head, and my heart, literally explode.)
Please, may any forces of good there may be, be with these children and their parents, who are now at the mercy of our soulless “leaders.” And may something, someone, STOP these monsters.
Do you suppose that our consumer society is loosing its ability to care? Scribe, I feel that very same scream building.
I don’t know what to think anymore. I just feel crazy, watching everyone around me,including my own grown kids, carrying on with their lives as if none of this is even happening, and I KNOW they are loving,compassionate human beings. It’s as if people are wrapped tight in some kind of invisible film of sheer denial. I dunno, maybe one needs to be, while still needing be out there earning a living. But I seem to have lost all the insulating denial I ever had.
I know the feeling. It is like you want to grab them and shake them or do something. But at the same time, you start feeling that maybe it is you who is being oversensitive.
No. Not anymore do I feel ever it’s me or “oversensitivity” in any form. Finding all of you who feel as strongly as I do had been a tremendous comfort and validation that I am indeed very sane. I think it’s more like some of us have been shocked wide awake and stripped of whatever psychological defenses that would allow us to ignore any of it anymore. Or maybe we were just finally ready to let them go. In any case, I am glad we have each other, and places like this to gather and share some pooled strength. Some days all we can do is offer each other an understanding and comforting (((((hug))))like this one I am sending to you.
these monsters. And yet, they, too, will rant every once in a while. But they don’t go looking at the horrors unless somebody shows them to them.
“…shocked wide awake and stripped of whatever psychological defenses that would allow us to ignore any of it anymore.”
And it hurts like hell to be forcefully freed from the myth of American exceptionalism, doesn’t it?
As a person born in 1940, who learned to salute before I could string together a real sentence, it has been one of the most painful awful experiences of my life, Nag. Since losing my beloved brother in Nam, and beginning to open my long sealed shut eyes, it has been nothing by one awful revelation of betrayal of my trust after another, and there seems to be no end to it in sight. I know this: if I could have chosen, knowing what I know now, I would not have chosen this country as my place of birth. In fact, if, (as I was taught so very well) America truly IS the “best country in the world”, I might not have even chosen this planet.
“It’s un-Christian, and it’s time somebody says something,” Johnson-Castro said. “Our objective is to shut this thing down and to shut down any kind of consciousness that would exploit humans who are in desperate straits.”
No, it’s inhuman!!! Enough of the faux Christian bleating. Protest because the practice is generally sickening, not because it crosses some perceived religious directive. Protest because it’s just fucking wrong!!!
Who needs religious directives when babies are incarcerated and made to wear prison uniforms? (and Bush walks free to create murder, mayhem and havoc)
Unfortunately, many people seem to require the religious directive as a moral compass, which may not be inherent. So be it, if it inspires truly positive action (without which any spiritual practice or moral sense is lifeless).
Land of the free? Home of the brave?
Scary, scary babies. WTF?!!!!
All this leaves me with an eerie feeling of impending doom. The signs are there – the targeting of a distinct group, separating families, spiriting them away secretly to concentration camps and holding them incommunicado. Can the crematoriums really be far behind?
This is yet another disgusting, horrific crime committed against humanity by the neocons and their greedy cronies. Few of our so-called leaders have spoken out against it. TPMMuckraker has some items on the raids, the aftermath, as well as two who have denounced the raids, Sen Tom Harkin and Gov Tom Vilsack.
Please excuse me while I go put tin foil on my grocery list. I seem to be reaching it a lot more often the last few weeks.
Our only hope is the naked truth. Hopefully, with oversight finally happening, the atmosphere of the country will be more open to admit that these things are happening here, now. We must do everything we possibly can to prevent another republican from taking the White House… ESPECIALLY McCain. Things could get much much worse. I have a creepy feeling about him… a potential severe authoritarian. Imagine the power Bush has stolen combined with half an intellect.
The raids were widely criticized for splitting up families, forcing the children to be handed off to relatives or friends. I thought that was horrific, until I found out about the prison camps. Nah, it has nothing to do with tin foil and everything to do with eyes wide open.
on so many levels. How are these bastards getting away with incarcerating children and their parents with no charges filed? This makes me sick and scared at the same time. Why are we not in the streets? Why, why, why? WE need to do something because our elected reps sure as shit are too busy shopping for Christmas or vacationing in the Bahamas.
yet another hellish revelation of another monstrous policy that I hadn’t heard about. How do you keep up with such monsters? How do you stop them if most of your neighbors know nothing about this stuff, and worse they either support it or don’t want to know?
Add my voice to the scream of outrage, and add my tears and aching heart to those of the rest of us so engaged.
I have been trying for several days now to get some sort of understanding about the so-called “war mentality.” I am desperately seeking anything at all that will shed some light on it for me. How can there be those who say, “kill them all! if they are in Iraq they are at the very least guilty of being Iraqi. Kill them all!” I have been throughly sickened by the excuse makers for our little band of Marines who “got even” by executing 10 women and children up close and personal. So war or the participation in it excuses everything? Our country didn’t seem to think so when it was the Nazi’s we were determined to pay for their crimes. It is different, apparently, when we do it. And this is only one incident in dozens if not hundreds. There is so much of a vile, inhumane, cruel, vicious, hateful action going on and has been going on that I am not so sure we are capable of letting it in to our collective hearts. NOT MY COUNTRY! If we actually did these things, then there must have been a really good reason. . .blah, blah, blah. . .
I understand peoples need for denial. I understand how painful it is to even think about these things let alone actually look at them. The pain is so great it is very difficult to take it in.
It breaks my heart daily, some days it is hourly. What does it take to get the vast majority of people to wake the F**k up? We need a relentless TV saturation, apparently, that gives information out endlessly before anyone will pay attention.
Thanks for the information, Nag. Talk radio has been asking daily where these people are and what are their circumstances. I haven’t heard anyone yet say they know where they are, so your info is very timely. (I guess enough people aren’t listening to Air America Radio or Nova-M Radio, or whatever any may have access to locally).
It is hard to imagine we can take much more. Certainly those who are the victims of these horrible actions can’t take any more. Me, sitting in my safe, warm and cozy house in outback Idaho can’t take any more either.
I guess we learned nothing positive from the Holocaust. Yeah, I guess 60 years is too long to hold a memory.
I am disgusted and brokenhearted.
Shirl
Shirl, let me share this small part of an email conversation I had earlier, regarding a friend’s desire to see Bush et al physically destroyed:
Imho: very unfortunately, Allied military victory against German fascism still informs the sense of a nationally intrinsic moral superiority. Throw Bush’s l’etat, c’est moi ‘leadership’ style against that & nothing sticks; we’re teflon exempt, as a nation, from anything on the opposite side of white we can perceive, in our commonly black/white political sensibility.
It’s too bad, really. A unique international position has been totally perverted in the dark, while we slept. IOW, we dreaming Americans remain uniquely blinded to ourselves, as a people, by our former glory.
& yes, I do believe we need a relentless TV saturation, apparently, that gives information out endlessly before anyone will pay attention because this is how we seem to discover reality & how to respond to it. At least as reflected by our public discourse as reflected by TV.
A lousy position, that.
Let’s try that again: contained to = limited to.
I only seek to clarify the workings of my fevered brain for you, as I attempt to wrap it ’round a horrifying state of affairs.
Yes. And as a totally non-violent person I don’t and cannot condone violence towards any other.
It is hearts and minds that need to change. . . not the physical presence of one or another. When violence, hate, injury, greed et al, become unacceptable to us as a world, then it will cease. At the most personal levels of human interactions, these behaviors must become UNACCEPTABLE, and all the way up the “food chain.”
And it is a lousy position we find our country and world in. . .
Hugs and loves,
Shirl
If violence & hatred are sef-perpetuating, so, I believe, are the opposing energies.
Personally, I give deepest thanks for those among us who retain the practice of peace as their guiding principle. Needless to say, I include you in my gratitude.
There really is no hope for us otherwise.
By the way: belated Solstice blessings to you, Shirl! May the holidays multiply your joys & return to you the love you’ve set free.
Oh Shirl, that war mentality is a noose around the neck of this country. What can motivate a person to cheer on torture, to be proud of murderous soldiers, to viciously push for more of the same… other than fear? They are disconnected from the pain of others… those very same war cheerleaders are the ones who would see no wrong in imprisoning whole families. The ones who screech and scream because a Congressman wants to swear on the Qu’ran. They see no problem with bombing Iran or shooting brown people crossing our borders, no questions asked. I believe that many of those war mongers would otherwise be complacent and uncaring, but for fear… xenophobia, fear of terror, fear of loosing their way of life, fear of their own shadow. That combination of lack of capacity for human empathy mixed with irrational fear creates the warmongers. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they only care about themselves.
The thing is, I’d like to believe that the most rabid warmongers are in the minority, they just have all the microphones. Just like neocons are a minority of the rank and file republicans, I’m hoping that most Americans are capable of seeing the truth for what it is, painful as that may be.
” We need a relentless TV saturation, apparently, that gives information out endlessly before anyone will pay attention.”
That’s exactly right, people need it screamed at them, they need to start looking at bloody war photos and the faces of the children we’re killing and imprisoning. It just may start with the coming oversight hearings. My hope for our country rides on that slim thread of a chance that someone will start to actually talk about these things in the press.
Get your free posters to hang-up over a The Unapologetic Mexican.
This is just one of four types
Those are very good, XP. Thanks for the link.
Unfortunately, (probably due to crappy computer) I’ve tried clicking on one to get a better look at detail, but the screen doesn’t change. I’ll try again later.
I think you will be able to get a better look now. He add a link for a larger view.
We have already had the torture not to mention the mass murders in Iraq in our name. We have had the illegal phone taps and the detention without trial. We have the outsourcing of torture and murder through rendition. We have resorted to collective punishment and other assorted war crimes. We have seen our not so intelligent intelligence organizations resort to kidnapping and generally committing crimes on even our allies soil. We have seen our military use illegal weaponry. We have had our constitution discarded. Now we get the concentration camps.
What will we get next? All Muslims have to wear a yellow crescent on their clothing? When will Chertoff et al just resort to death camps? Maybe they already have!