Before I had children, I didn’t really think about children all that much. Sure, I knew they were out there, and that sometimes they were cute, and sometimes they were not so damn cute, but I pretty much thought about people having kids the same way I thought about people having pet chimpanzees. Some people had them, I suppose (for whatever bizarre reason), but that fact really didn’t affect me all that much. There would be long stretches of days when I would get up in the morning and go to bed at night without ever once having thought about either children or chimpanzees. (At least not until I read that awful story about someone’s pet chimp biting a woman’s face off, at which point chimps were definitely off the table.)
And then I went and had kids myself, and suddenly I started noticing that kids were everywhere. At the park, in the grocery store, running out into traffic—it was like I had been bitten by some radioactive mother spider and my mom-senses had been turned up to 11: not only was I now able to sense when my own kids were about to stick a fork into an uncovered outlet (this actually happens a lot more than you think), but when other kids were as well. I could hear a child crying from all the way across the park and instantly know that it wasn’t an “I-dropped-my-nasty-SpongeBob-popsicle-in-the-even-nastier-wood-chips” cry, but rather a “my-head-is-stuck-in-the-railing” one, and I, along with nearly every other parent in the park, would be off and running.
It didn’t matter if I didn’t know the child. It didn’t matter if I didn’t like the parents. Heck, it didn’t even matter if I didn’t like the child. There is just something about hearing a child in genuine distress that pushes every single one of a parent’s buttons. I’m sure it is biological—evolutionary, even—but knowing that the feeling is coming from deep in my lizard brain doesn’t take the feeling away. If anything, it amplifies it, because “primal” in no way translates to “wrong.”
Which is why I am at an utter loss to explain how any parent can listen to the audio recording of separated children crying in a detention facility and not want to fix this problem immediately. And, correspondingly, not be driven to despair by their inability to do so.
We used to all be in agreement about this. We used to be so horrified at the thought of a single child being separated from their parents that we turned every breakfast into a search party, with face after face staring out at us from the backs of milk cartons as we ate our cereal and drank our coffee.
“Have you seen me?” the milk asked us, and we responded by asking ourselves, “Have I? Have I seen them? What about that kid at the grocery store last week? He looked kind of familiar. Damn, maybe I should have been paying better attention.”
We worried about our ability to recall a face seen briefly in black and white at the breakfast table, and questioned the effectiveness of the whole enterprise, but never once did we ask “Does this child deserve to be found?” Never once did we turn the carton over, looking for answers to questions like, “But what if the parents don’t speak English?” or “What if they didn’t fill out the right paperwork?”
No. We saw the picture and felt the pain, the same way you can feel the effects of an earthquake that happened hundreds of miles away. Or at least I thought we all did. Now I’m not so sure.
Maybe there have always been parents out there who turned the carton to the other side, who could ignore the sound of somebody else’s child in distress. Maybe they have been hiding in plain sight all along, waiting for the right moment to let their true callousness out in public.
If that is true then I can’t help but wish that those people had opted for the chimpanzee route instead of the parent one, mostly because I’m afraid that such unfeeling parents can’t help but raise unfeeling children in return. And also because I like to picture those people getting their smug faces bitten right off.
Actually, I like to picture that a whole lot.
Great piece. The monsters in the White House are just that; and vile, vicious and evil.