Zero Tolerance and the American Heart

Our former students left East Germany before the wall fell—the husband by masquerading as a businessman from another part of Germany, counterfeiting an accent unlike his own. The wife followed under mysterious circumstances she’s never explained. The children, both under the age of four, were left with grandparents. At the time our friends left, they had no idea the wall would come down a few months later. They were willing to leave their children behind for an indefinite period. I understood how desperate they were when the husband, a builder, revealed he’d had a friend at a construction site pull out a splinter that had landed in his eye. They'd been “borrowing” materials from the site. Being blind in that eye saved him from going to the hospital, where the doctors would have been too scared not to turn him over to the authorities for stealing.

When I try to imagine conditions that would make me willing to risk death or eternal separation from my children, the families pouring into detention centers in Texas come to mind. They have some idea of the cruel deal imposed upon them by the Trump administration. They are fleeing conditions that make the unwelcome ones they encounter luxurious. Better to be deprived of your children but know they will be fed and clothed; better to be stuck in a cage lying on a pallet in a former WalMart than killed by drug lord, chewed by rats, or starving. I listen to the Pro Publica recording of weeping children begging for their parents and try to imagine what Emma Lazarus would write. Her “New Colossus” sonnet is affixed to the base of our national monument, the statue of liberty,

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

We might as well tear down the statue of liberty. She's no longer allowed to lift her lamp and welcome the "wretched refuse"  because our president insists on blocking refugees from what he's infamously called "shit hole countries." 

 Trump’s business is to separate. He’s separating parents from children, he’s separating citizen from citizen, party from party—his immigration policy is the logical extension of his lifelong mission to divide and conquer. He’s saying and doing things that make us angry. In spite of him we should—as the German comedian Jan Böhmermann said in his “Be Deutsch” video, “hold together, try to be nice.” Ignore the haters—or laugh at them. Volunteer for groups that help get those children reunited with their parents. Speak up, Republicans, and remember Abraham Lincoln’s vision for your party.

When our East German friends settled in a Western German state, they decorated a hallway in their home with a placard purloined from an East German tunnel: “You are now leaving East Germany.” Let us leave behind those who separate; let us pull together and re-make America. On the (1999-2006) TV series The West Wing, the fictional president played by Martin Sheen solved an illegal Chinese immigrant crisis by looking the other way so that detainees could melt into the population. A president with a heart would do this.