I find Father’s Day to be a day I think about my kids, my dreams and aspirations for them, and I reflect on how they are doing in life. As with any good father, I desire for my children to experience a life of fullness, a life of Shalom, a life where nothing is missing and nothing is broken. I examine my life and reflect on my successes and failures in providing an environment where they could flourish. I reflect on what I used to call blessing for the opportunities I was able to provide my children . . . what I now call privilege. And I think about all the fathers out there who do not have my same privileges, who are desperate to escape their oppression and provide for their children the opportunities that came so easy for me to provide.
Today I was reading some comments on Facebook
about our government's current actions of taking children away from immigrant families who
arrive at our border, families seeking asylum (or maybe just arriving at our border
seeking a better life). I kept seeing the same familiar refrain, "They should
have come legally."
This is my reflection on . . . “They should
have come legally!!!
Ah . . . You must mean come legally like our
white ancestors did and take the land away from the inhabitants by force.
You must mean come legally and take control of
the land by either killing off the inhabitants or moving them to the most
undesirable parts of the country - maybe call them reservations.
Oh, you mean come legally and Infect the
inhabitants with your diseases. That will get rid of a large number of them and
make it easier to take their land.
. . . and while you're busy inhabiting the land
legally, why not take their children away from them and forcibly remove the
inhabitants culture from their children by indoctrinating them with your
religion and practices. (Learn more)
Wait . . . take people's children away from
them???
It seems it doesn't matter whether we - the
white people - are taking a land, that doesn't belong to us, away from POC
(Native Americans) OR, we - the white people - are doing everything we can to
keep POC (in this case Latinos), who simply want a better life for their
children the way our ancestors did, out of this land (that our ancestors
stole). Regardless of the reason, it is OK for white people to separate
families. It is OK to remove children from their parents or parents from their
children (we'll save the impact of our mass incarceration policies for another
writing).
It simply does not matter the circumstances . . . WE WHITE FOLKS
JUST LOVE TO TAKE CHILDREN AWAY FROM THEIR PARENTS, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE PARENTS
ARE PEOPLE OF COLOR and we either want what they have or we are protecting what we got.
And then, we have the unmitigated gall to use
passages from the Bible to justify these actions!
Maybe it is time for us to remember what Jesus
had to say about messing with the faith and innocence of a child: "Whoever
causes one of these little ones who believe to stumble, it would be
better for him if, with a heavy millstone hung around his neck, he had
been cast into the sea." that is of course unless the children are Native
American, or Latino immigrants seeking asylum, or Muslim refugees, or . . .
Scattered across these United States of America
tonight, there are 100's and 1000's of father's with an ache in their soul
because their children have been taken from them simply because they wanted a
better life for their children.
In various locations in these United States of
America, there are children living in cages, taken from their fathers, simply
because their fathers wanted a better life for their children.
These fathers are NO DIFFERENT THAN OUR WHITE
FATHERS, and GRANDFATHERS, and GREAT GRANDFATHERS, and (let the ancestral tree
continue). These children are NO DIFFERENT THAN OUR CHILDREN WERE OR ARE TODAY.
Heavenly Father, Forgive Us . . .
May Your Kingdom come on earth, as it is in Heaven
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