This photo was taken by the United States Coast Guard in 1994. The woman, Rosaura, is handing her four-year-old son over to a member of the Coast Guard after having just survived the treacherous journey from Havana to Miami, through the 90 miles of shark-infested water in the Florida Strait. Rosaura, her husband, their four-year-old son, and their seven-year-old daughter set sail–along with others–in a rickety, tattered old boat, knowing there was an equal chance of finding freedom and prosperity in the United States of America or going together into a watery grave. The only sure things in Rosaura and her husband’s minds were that they no longer wanted to live in a country oppressed by Fidel Castro and that they wanted a better life for themselves and a better place to raise their children.
They were not invited to the United States; they had filed no papers, made no official request. They simply embarked on an uncertain journey, desperately hoping for the best; their courage was rewarded with kindness, compassion, and welcome assistance. Here’s how their now-grown daughter, Zuly, describes the outset of their venture:
“The memories of the last night in Cuba were recorded forever in my memory. Dense darkness and surrounded by mosquitoes that stung so hard we had to cover our heads with javitas cubalse to protect us from their horrible bites. As we walked through the marshes, I was strongly held by my mother’s hand. Finally, we boarded a small, old wooden boat that would bring us to freedom or death at sea. Crushed by huge waves, we use plastic bags to vomit and prevent sharks from surround the fragile boat.”
Then, at the end of the grueling journey:
“The Diecisietes aboard the 20-foot ship were rescued by the United States Coast Guard. After taking the fingerprints and interrogated, they took us to ‘the house of the boatman,’ where we get food and a hot bath. With the gift of a barbie doll they welcomed me to America-my new home.”
What touches my heart so deeply in this photo is the expression on the mother’s face and the calmness of her four-year-old son. This photo stands in sharp contrast to the recent heart-wrenching photos of families arriving at our southern border, not to be given a meal, a hot bath, and a toy for the children but to be ripped apart by border patrol agents. The photos of crying children and desperate, frantic parents will forever be part of our national history and symbols of this shameful era. This child is not crying; there is no panic in his eyes. The woman does not appear to be assaulted or coerced; she looks relieved and hopeful as she willingly and confidently places her son into the hands of their rescuers.
She had fled in desperation, believing that even death at sea was preferable to living any longer in bondage, and she survived. She survived to be rescued and welcomed to a land of freedom and opportunity. She survived so that she and her husband could–through hard work, perseverance, and education–regain the professional status they sacrificed to leave Cuba. She survived to see her children become educated, professional adults who are driven to pay forward the love, compassion, and generosity that was shown to them. Rosaura’s seven-year-old daughter is now 31 and in her last year of a dental surgery residency at Mayo Clinic. I know and love this family because the mother, daughter, and son were among my students at the community college where I taught when they were just beginning their education in the United States.
During these recent days when we’ve had our hearts ripped out by the photos of desperate people who have not been shown such warm welcomes to our shores, the comment I’ve read over and over is “This is not who we are.” Unfortunately, that’s not true. It is exactly who we are, because this latest flagrant human rights and family rights violation is, sadly, not America’s first rodeo.
We have only to look back 399 years, to the very beginning of European colonization of the North American continent, to find dark-skinned families who were kidnapped and brought to our shores to be sold to white plantation owners, without regard for family unity. They may as well have been hunks of meat plopped on the butcher’s scale and then sold to the highest bidder. Often, a husband went to one plantation, wife to another, and each child old enough to be of use to some white owner sold to whoever would pay the asking price. These were not isolated incidents.
One reason Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin made such an impact on pre-civil war readers is that it focuses on a mother who fights to remain united with her child after overhearing a conversation between her owner and a slave-trader who wants to buy her young son. For many readers, this novel raised awareness for the first time of the fact that those dark-skinned people had the same emotions that white people have. Slave mothers were as fiercely protective of their children as the white owners were of their children. Slave mothers were as distraught and desperate when threatened with separation from their children as white owners would have been if separated from theirs. In Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn, the goal that drives Jim, the run-away slave, is the hope of finding freedom so that he can then buy back his wife and child who have been living and working on another plantation.
During the following years of our history, our ancestors continued their abuse of dark-skinned children of God in their genocide of the Native Americans. Assuming themselves superior to the indigenous people of this land, white European settlers fought wars and killed thousands, leading finally to the Indian Removal Bill of 1830. The bill was championed by then President Andrew Jackson, whose reasoning went like this:
“In Jackson’s thinking, more than three dozen eastern tribes stood in the way of what he saw as the settlers’ divinely ordained rights to clear the wilderness, build homes and grow cotton and other crops. In his annual address to Congress in 1833, Jackson denounced Indians, stating, ‘They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race…they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere [before] long disappear.’”
The story continues:
“From 1830 to 1840, the U.S. army removed 60,000 Indians—Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee and others—from the East in exchange for new territory west of the Mississippi. Thousands died along the way of what became known as the ‘Trail of Tears.’” (from History Stories on history.com)
Well, now we know Jeff Sessions and the Trump Cult are not the first Americans to claim that evil and inhumanity can be ordained of God when it suits their own greedy purposes.
Moving along through the history book, we come to February 19, 1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the deportation and incarceration of children of God of Japanese descent. Between 110,000 and 120,000–of whom about 62 percent were U.S. citizens and some of whom had family members serving in the U.S. military defending the very country that had incarcerated their relatives–were moved into internment camps. Some were housed in barely-converted horse stables. For a graphic fictionalized account, read the book or watch the movie Snow Falling on Cedars.
With a history like this, we don’t get to clutch our pearls when we see photos of crying children who’ve been torn from their parents’ arms and exclaim “This is not who we are.” The facts prove otherwise. Cruelty to children of God with darker skin tones and knee-jerk reactions against all members of a race or ethnic group or religious group because of the actions of a few of its members (Japanese after Pearl Harbor, Muslims after 9/11) are all-too-well-documented evidence of who we are and who we have always been as a people.
Yet there also exists within us what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” As a people, we have committed great atrocities, but we have also done great good. We have welcomed the “tired,” the “poor,” the “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,” “the wretched refuse of [a] teeming shore,” “the homeless,” the “tempest tossed.” We have given people hope who had never known hope. As the strongest nation in the world, we have with often the best intention sent our own troops to the far corners of the world to champion the cause of freedom and to defend oppressed peoples. Although these ventures have not always ended well and one may rightly question whether the intentions were always pure, they demonstrate in many cases our belief that we are those to whom much has been given and therefore those from whom much is expected.
Since World War II, many countries of the world have looked to us for moral guidance and physical protection. The title “Leader of the Free World” emerged during the post-war period, when President Harry Truman gave us the Truman Doctrine, which he defined to Congress as “The policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Although our dominance on the world stage is rapidly eroding because of our government’s current state of chaos, we can call upon our “better angels” to fix the mess we’ve created and to be the people whom others expect us to be and whom we ourselves know we can be.
The photo at the beginning of this article is a compelling reminder of who we CAN be. Yes, we are a nation of laws; and yes, some of those laws govern immigration; and yes, for the sake of safety and security we must exercise control over who comes into our country. But laws without compassion and humanity are simply computer algorithms. Laws are made by humans and must be continually interpreted by humans to keep them in tune with the times and circumstances. Judges are humans who must use discretion and wisdom; and like parents and teachers who have to know when to enforce the rules and when to extend grace, those keepers of the law must know that laws have to be applied with large doses of empathy, grace, and mercy.
If Jeff Sessions had read a bit further beyond his cherry-picked verse, Romans 13:1–“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God” (NIV)–he’d have found Romans 13: 10: “Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” It should also be noted here that the document on which our government is based is our Constitution, not the Bible; but if someone wants to cite the Bible, he or she should do so with understanding.
I dream of my grandchildren growing up in an America like the one portrayed in the photo of Rosaura and her son: an America that extends love and compassion to desperate people and where those people, through their own motivation and perseverance, can not only survive but also thrive and prosper. We can’t erase the sins of our past, and it’s going to take some time to repair the shame of our present; but we have within us what it takes to create an America where skin color is not a determiner of one’s value, where laws are enforced with grace and mercy, and where no one has to live in fear because of oppression and prejudice. Maybe the photos of crying children at the border really do represent who we ARE, but Rosaura’s photo represents who we CAN be if we’re willing to appeal to the “better angels of our nature.”
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