Elayne Clift (elayne-clift.com) has written this column about women, politics, and social issues for two decades.
BRATTLEBORO-During the snowstorms in January, my family managed to meet up for a birthday celebration in sunny California where the temperatures were in the 60s and 70s and the sky was beautifully blue every day.
The winter respite was lovely but sobering as well, because I knew we were lucky to be able to take the trip since we are what could be called, in economic terms, privileged. That alone made me feel guilty as we departed.
The guilt persisted as I watched children having fun on the beaches. I kept thinking of all the incarcerated children in what are called “detention facilities,” but which I view as concentration camps.
Those kids are eating foul food, sleeping on cold floors, being denied necessary healthcare, education, clean water, and fresh air. Worst of all, they are often separated from their parents, even as infants and toddlers.
The older ones draw pictures like the ones by children starving and ill in Germany’s Holocaust camps. Others have written letters that are now surfacing on social media.
Here is an excerpt from a letter 14-year-old Ariana wrote after being detained for 45 days.
“I have never felt so much fear to go to a place as I feel here[.] Every time I remind myself that once I go back to Honduras a lot of dangerous things could happen to my mom and I. My younger siblings haven’t seen their mom in over a month. [...] Since I got to this Center all [I] feel is sadness and mostly depression. [...] It[’]s sad to hear that people[’]s cases are being denied and [they] are being sen[t] back to countr[ies] [...] where they are escaping from and are looking for protection and want to feel safe. [...] Serious situations happen here and the officers can’t take them serious enough and there are no [consequences], they don’t care.”
The juxtaposition of exuberance and trauma was entirely dissonant. How could these two simultaneous scenarios possibly make sense?
That dissonance was mirrored and magnified by watching people in museums, parks, restaurants, and cafés enjoying themselves as if nothing were wrong or troubling. I felt as if I were being jolted back to normal times, when we all felt relatively safe, and random acts of violence were not something we had to fear every day.
Yet how could we ignore what was going on in our world?
* * *
Just a brief glance at the news each morning and evening gave me pause and reminded me of the worries that seemed ever-present and inescapable. I couldn’t stop feeling guilty for enjoying myself as day by day the dissonance became more disturbing.
All over the world, while we were enjoying our time together, devastating weather events marked a serious sign of possibly unsolvable climate change that could mean global water shortages, droughts that will increase migration, and other events that will irretrievably alter our ways of life and threaten social and political stability.
Added to these threats and dangers we now face is the lack of political will to do what is urgently needed while we still have time. Science is seriously under attack, as is access to healthcare and public health preventive measures, no matter how sick people might be.
Meanwhile, our government is sabotaging environmental protection from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and weather information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
This is a recipe for disaster.
As Indigenous writer Robert Coulter posted on LinkedIn last December, “What’s being spun as bureaucratic reshuffling is actually a brazen assault on research that keeps people safe and economies functioning in a world facing escalating climate chaos.”
In his post, which focused on relevant issues and pending crises that require scientific research and activity, he concluded with this warning: If we don’t fight now to protect these institutions and the scientists “who make sense of our changing planet, we’ll be left with nothing but political spin while the climate crisis unfolds with ever-greater ferocity.
“This is our planet on the line, and our democracy too,” he said.
* * *
To expand upon this focus on the threatening absence of research, I would add that the travesties we’ve witnessed and worried about, ranging from ICE murders to threats of cancelled elections and election interference, all occur because our current inept and inhumane power brokers in government are colluding with their financially privileged and deeply corrupt cronies.
Since I am by nature a worrier, I have sleepless nights about all of this, but it’s something we all need respite from, and we shouldn’t feel guilty about how and where we find it. I’m trying to drop the guilt while recognizing the disturbing dissonance we are living with in these dark days. I hope others are seeing that as well.
Returning home from my respite there was plenty of ice, but it wasn’t unexpected or alarming. It’s ICE, and everything it represents, that gives me restless nights, along with the deep and disturbing dissonance that prevails.
This Voices column was submitted to The Commons.
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