Now What do We Do? UPDATED with MORE RESOURCES

By now, most people plugged into the news or the internet, know about the deplorable conditions of the "not concentration summer camps."

After reading about the investigation by the lawyers, the reports here, and here, and here, and the stories began to trend, the government acted. Reports are, many of the children have been removed from the facilities where they were in unsanitary and unsafe conditions, neglected, dirty and in need. They were taken to some other facility, possibly in El Paso...but the world does not know where or for that matter, if the conditions are better or worse. The problem with this situation is, the problems came to light, and now, the problem is gone not because the children are necessarily being better treated, but because we don't know how they are being treated or where...so there's nothing to see because we don't know where to look. Want the source? Government moves over 300 children.

So where did the government move the children maltreated in an overcrowded government facility so that they would be not maltreated by the government? Transparency is only possible where there is access. We can't access what we don't know, and the more these children are moved around and shuffled about, the less we know, and the more opportujnity for abuse and neglect.

If past is prologue, remember when this was shocking? Miami Herald July, 2018. Prison or Summer Camp? What is ignored, gets worse, it's a simple reality of human nature. It's true in relationships, in health, in education, in hobbies and professions, in houses and in habits. It's true of governments too.

Several journalists wrote articles about what the ordinary person (rightly upset) can do.

How to Help Migrant Children --by Rose Minutaglio and Madison Feller

and here: Advocates Say the Fastest Way to help immigrants is to post their bail --by Kari Paul

and here: Where to Donate by Meghan Leonhardt But it does seem, not everything people rally to do, helps so use the resources cited in the above articles. Self intiiated rallies (like I'd thought might be cool), don't work: People want to donate diapers, they're being turned away.

Still, some people are trying to raise donations to address the basic needs.  

From a Facebook post: *ATTN: PROLIFE ORG LEADERS*

NWF is about to launch another campaign to get supplies to families at the border. Let us know if you’d like to be a part of this one. All you would need to do it share the campaign and we will take care of the rest. We will collect the donations, purchase the supplies, and take them to the families getting out of detainment.

They desperately need our help right now and this should be a team effort. If you’re interested in having your org listed as a sponsor please shoot me a DM!

We will be headed to the border on July 13th.

UPDATE: Y’all are amazing. If your group is in, send me a pic of your logo. I’m gonna start working on the flier now and want to get as many groups listed as possible before we share it on NWF!

Also, we are currently working to get connected to an actual detainment center, but as of right now they’re turning away donations. Hopefully we will get an in, but either way we will also be taking supplies to the respite centers that these families are processed through after they’re released from the detainment centers.

 Reach out to Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa and New Wave Feminist if you want to help. 

Anyone who considers themselves Catholic, must act. Anyone who considers themselves Pro-life, must act.  Anyone who recognizes, we are each of us, our brother’s keeper, must act or we’ll be part of that group saying “Lord, Lord, when did we see you hungry?” 

Excellent write up of the theology that puts God’s law above national law: https://sojo.net/articles/how-we-treat-immigrants-how-we-treat-god

People rallied, they demanded action, they're protesting, there are articles and calls to action but the children themselves, the pawns in all of this,can't be protected from anything when no one other than the ones who moved them, know where they are. So now we have an invisible crisis we can't assess. Where are they? It feels a bit like the arc of the covenant being studied by "Top men."

It doesn't matter whether you are pro or anti our existing inconsistent hap-hazard immigration policy, anyone who professes the innate dignity of everyone, must want our government to safeguard these children, who cannot advocate for themselves or escape. The level of care must exceed what we would want for our own children if they were ever separated from us in a foriegn land. Anything else is a figleaf excuse. Where are they?

Remember when not yet President Ronald Reagan said the scariest words in the world are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help?" I do. They aren't funny anymore. Call your representative, and ask them, "Where are the children?" Ask until we know. Find your representative here and your Senators too. Call your local paper. Call your Archdiocese. We need everyone asking, everyone looking, and everyone understanding, these people will be forgotten unless we refuse to allow it.

Oh, I reached out the Archdiocese of El Paso and am waiting to hear back on what they're trying to do. 

When We Go Wrong

It always seems like it's easier to just keep going, to say to whoever, "I'm too small." "It's too big a problem." "It's not my problem." and "What can you do?"  It always seems like it's easier to shrug the shoulders and say, "It is what it is."

However, the world will only grow crueler, less just, less warm, less beautiful, less like the very good place it's always been intended to be, if we become either permanently enraged, or put on the robes of apathy.   "What can we do?"

It is not a moral act to follow an evil law.  There is no law that requires children to be separated. It's a criminal and immoral response to a problem. 

First, we must name evil as evil.   Taking children from their parents, putting them in cages.  It's simple. It's evil.  I don't care who did it.  I care it's being done at all.  It needs to stop yesterday.  Somewhere, there's a charity or a firm that needs to go and decide to represent however many children are in cages and they need to fight.   We need to fight with them.  We need to sign petitions, call our representatives and tell them to pass bill after bill after bill after bill demanding the reuniting of these families.  We need to call our journalists, on every network, everwhere and have them run story after story after story after story, so we see the faces of these families, so we must stop pretending this story is merely an embarrassment, and recognize it for the cruelty, the absolute wrong that it is.   We need to call the White House and demand that they reverse policy.  The phones should not rest. The emails should not cease.  The coverage should not stop until this policy stops, and every child is reunited. 

This issue should transcend party, it should blanket the nation.  Every mother and father should ache for those mothers and fathers who don't know where their children are.  Every child should weep for the separation deliberately caused by a government unwilling to even admit, it's going on and too cowardly to acknowledge, it must stop. It's beyond wrong.

Most of us grew up knowing the phrase, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" by Edmund Burk.  We know from history, silence because the law allows for something, permits the veneer of law and order to gloss over attrocities on a micro and macro scale; be it slavery, segregation, discrimination, abortion or any other injustice perpetuated with the reassurance, it's the law. 

We go wrong when we forget the purpose of the law.  We go wrong when we allow the law to be a tyrant.  We go wrong when law supercedes mercy, forgiveness, kindness, charity, and freedom.   We go wrong when we allow ourselves to stay comfortable and think, someone else should do something.  We go wrong when we justify not doing something because we don't think it will make a difference.  Every act makes a difference, even if we don't make the news, because every act which is humane, is a rebellion against the tyranny of the wrongness of the world. 

The government is without checks or ballances or a moral compass right now, so it needs people of good will, ordinary, everyday people, to be the moral compass, and to become those who stand against what is being done in our name.   We must learn the first rule of spiritual physics.  We cannot bring about a good by doing evil.  The problem of immigration, and of needing a means of bringing people in, and legally processing them, requires a better response than treating those who come as subhuman.  Anyone who refuses to recognize the evil of taking a toddler from her mother, is wilfully blind. Wifully ignorant.  Wilfully pretending what is cruel, is not cruel.  It is no different than  wilfully ignoring the trains going by, wilfully pretending the child in the womb isn't a child, wilfully declaring someone not to have rights because of whatever one opts to decide is the reason, they shouldn't have human rights.

It's time to fight this constant parade of cruelties with deliberate action, rather than gnashing of teeth.  When the law allows people to be cruel, the laws must be changed.  I don't care if it's been 200 years, or 2000 years.   The length of a law on the books does not prove it's validity or it's merit, only the willingness of people to not get engaged, not be involved.

Here's an article on what's being done: Complaint targets separation of immigrant families at the border.
Here's what we know: CNN article on zero-tolerance involving the separation of mother from her infant.  It's a worthy video to watch.
And the New York Times did a great piece which also includes phone numbers and actions to take: Seizing Children from Parents at the Border is Immoral.  and my online friend, Rebeca Bratten Weiss wrote Legality is not Morality,     
Here's who to call:
Call your representative.
If you need me, I'll be making some phone calls and writing some emails. 

The Growing Hidden Chorus

The California Governor opted to sign into law the "right to die,"  In India, non human "personhood" has been granted to dolphins, in an attempt to protect them from slaughter.  In American, unless we've decided not to, people have access to all the videos exposing the evil of Planned Parenthood's operations, and even the direct video is not enough to soften all hearts toward the children our society throws away by the thousands every day.

If people will not be moved by natural law, or by unethical behavior, or by foresight of the need for future preservation, if people will not cease cheering the Culture of "When do we get to kill?" advancing on all fronts, legalizing the slow destruction of people by drug use, or the final termination of any who despair via false charity mercy killings, then perhaps a history reminder will snap some from the reflexive embrace of all things if the right political party applauds or the wrong political party rejects.  

If the law can bequeath value, worth and protection, owing to the thinking of the day, then the law can taketh away.  We all know this from history, women, african-americans, children, untermensch, three-fifths of a person, savages, the unborn, whosoever we opt not to see as human, we do not treat as human, making our society, less humane.  To presume the moral code which keeps the power to "kill" from being abused will remain as it is, is also to ignore history, the history of law, and human nature.
The right to die, will become the obligation, because what we can do, we always do to excess.  What we allow via law, we codify as correct morally.  What we codify as correct morally leads to further exploration... well how far out is it correct to use this right to declare "personhood" or to strip it, and when is it right and just to usher a person out of life, as a kindness?  Does a smart dog have personhood?  What about a smart phone? Does a Down Syndrome child lack sufficient purpose to the society, such that he does not merit person hood once those who love him die?   If being desired and loved is what determines personhood --as in the case of the unborn, then if one is undesired or unloved as far as one knows, does one lose "personhood?" Is the status something conferred by the State, or by the individual?  What if the individual can't speak for him or herself?


We always cloak our moral rationalizing in such pastel terms.   And those who favor whatever modern sensibility has been advanced, will view any such concerns voiced by those who object to the fashionable new laws, as so much hand wringing.  Anyone concerned at the abuses such a law enacted in California and the four other states that sanction mercy killing, is written off, the equivalent of a Catholic Cassandra predicting the fall of Troy.

We will invent a new language, new terms to make the decision by a person to die more socially acceptable, less morally challenging, maybe pick a ribbon color that hasn't been designated yet, and make a particular month, the month --probably December, because that's so terribly considerate to family, to get it done at the end of the tax year.  These laws in California, in Oregon, New Mexico, Vermont and Washington and to a lesser extent, Montana, call it "death with dignity."   If this law metastasizes and spreads across the land, via the courts or popular opinion, dying will become an industry in this country, with customs and pomp and circumstance and glowing articles depicting how noble and selfless it is to do this for one's family.   A society that cannot bear hearing phrases which trigger emotional hurt, will have little tolerance for enduring the cross of growing old, or witnessing those who do.  

We can pretend they aren't people, we can declare them not people, or lacking or having lost "personhood," (because we gave it to the dolphins or the chips or the dogs or computers or trees or whatever other thing or creation we deem of more worth).  We can shout with laws and courts, politicians and celebrated beautiful powerful people, they are not people.   That does not make it truth; it only reveals how we are treating them, and our justification to our own selves.

Even absent my own deeply held religious convictions, people of good will, who believe we should care for the poor and the sick, who want a society which protects the weak from the powerful, should agree with the following sans any scaffolding of faith: there is no one more fragile than the one no one has to see; no one has to hear; no one has to know about.  There is no one more poor in society, than the one who has no say, no choice, and no chance except by the grace and mercy, charity and courage of others.

The government and laws which reflect the society governed, must protect the most vulnerable, or they are a form of tyranny against the powerless, sustaining the comfortable in their status quo.  The problem with that sort of scenario, is sooner or later, each of us will wind up on the other side of the equation, on the side those comfortable, don't favor. I return to the unborn because they get dismissed the most easily, but it applies to the elderly, the infirm, the disabled, the veterans, the homeless, the mentally ill, to any whom society deems less useful, to all who walk the earth unseen.

Here is why I stand against the law in California sanctioning the "right to die," and against abortion. Both laws stem from the same line of thinking, that life is tedious, painful, a nuisance and too much trouble if it is anything but care and worry free.  How long can a society endure, that cannot weather even paper cuts to the psyche?  How long can a people survive, intent on eliminating all who aren't perfect, either in genetics or in geriatrics?  What nation thrives under the delusion that all suffering can be eliminated from experience?

 Wake up. Wake up.  Wake up.  

Just today, we've lost three thousand.  

Those little ones die baptized in blood and water in the course of their short lives in the womb. I envision a great multitude in heaven of never before heard voices,  Those deliberately silenced form a choir so magnificent, we will wonder how we ever endured living on this Earth without their songs, and wonder why we wanted such a silence in the first place. 

Once More Into The Breech

I'd let this go, but the argument came from a dear friend who holds that because President Obama is NOT Catholic, the 2004 United States Council of Bishop statement on Catholics and Political life, does not apply.

By this reasoning, the decree asking that Universities not give a platform or awards or honors to people in positions of leadership or power that advocate/vidicate or promote positions antithetical to the Catholic faith (like say, abortion, stem cell research, and other hot button issues), only applies to Catholics not being true to their Catholic faith.

Okay. Let's go with that interpretation. Then, we are saying, we shall not honor people being hypocritical to their professed Catholic faith, because it is the disengenuousness of the individual that hurts the Church if the Church via the University, validates their position.

But it's okay if we're hypocritical to our own Catholic faith via the University by honoring those who legitimately disagree? If the graver sin is disengenuousness...

So the bottom line by this thinking is, we can honor President Obama at the University of Notre Dame, we just couldn't honor Joe Biden.

Look. Abortion kills children, but it also destroys souls and I'm not talking about the unborn, I'm referring to the mortal peril caused by agreeing to or performing such a henious act upon the innocent. Giving a platform to this President, given his predilictions on this topic, and past policy decisions, both before the election and since, provides comfort to those who would say that abortion is simply a hard imperfect decision, and not a moral issue with grave consequences.

Pray the rosary. Ask Mary directly to ask her Son for a miracle. The Lord listens to his Mother.

If you are new to the blog, check out Perhaps Why, Why the Notre Dame/Obama Scandal Matters and Yes I'm Still Mad, and Notre Dame Choses between God and Country. I keep thinking I'm done with this, but it is so hard to bear.