So I was reading The Booman’s brief, heartfelt and utterly commonsensical take on the border crisis provoked by tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors fleeing Central America for the United States—that’s your cue to go read it; I’ll wait here—nodding my head in agreement when I got to this passage:
“Why are so many parents sending their children on a long journey to America where an uncertain future awaits them? You can only imagine how desperate things must be for parents to even consider such a thing. Actually, I can’t really imagine it. I can’t imagine sending my son on such a journey. It’s unthinkable to me. But this is what a lot of parents are doing in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.”
I can’t imagine doing it either. But you know who could and did? My ancestors.
At age 10 my father was adopted from England, coming on a boat by himself to Ellis Island before being put on a train to travel hundreds of miles further before meeting his new family.
I have a great-grandmother who came from Ireland in the 1880s at age 13 with her 12 year old sister. According to family history, their parents had too many mouths and not enough food or money to feed them. So the girls traveled in steerage, by themselves, to America where an uncle lived and could help them find work in the mills so they could send money home.
Booman asks, “Is it too much for us to use our brains and have a little compassion?“; the answer (I think) depends largely on whether we can look at the children and teenagers coming today from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador and see them and their families as being fundamentally similar to ourselves and our own families.
The Breitbart photograph above could look like a lot of things to a lot of different people. One thing it looks like is the steerage section of Atlantic ships in the 19th century.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/