Margotlog: Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning To Be Free

Margotlog: "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning To Be Free"

The photo on the front page of the StarTribune 6/16/18 shows a boy, around six, staring up at an adult in combat garb toting a night-stick and hand gun. Behind the boy stands another adult wearing a red t-shirt, worn jeans, and running shoes.

How is it possible that the United States, home of immigrants from around the world, has begun in a big way, the separation of immigrant children from their parents? In 1900, my Italian grandmother, newly arrived in New York from Sicily. Her husband had served in the Italiay army and been sent to the North where he converted to Protestantism. When he returned to their tiny town in northern Sicily and built a small church for a very small congregation, Catholic townpeople burned it. He rebuilt, but the townpeople burned the second church. Fearing for their lives, the family came to New York. There Rose who would become my grandmother became so concerned for the hungry children and poorly clad women around her in the New York tenements that she delivered food, warm clothing, and blankets to residents three flights up. She soon collapsed and died.

Doing good for those in need is surely at the heart of every religious tradition on earth—that is, except for the Trump administration. Trump & Company have ordered thousands of children to be separated from their parents who’ve illegally crossed the U.S./Mexican border.

This U.S. policy smacks of Nazism, separating the “outsiders” from the clean, upright insiders, making those different from ourselves suffer. The thought of these thousands of children deprived of their parents and put in “holding pens” fills me with horror and dread. Congress needs to pass laws forbidding such heartless treatment of the friendless and powerless. It’s time those of us who are not Native American remembered that our ancestors also strove to enter this country, often poor and friendless. It is time we all remembered Emma Lazarus' poem on the Statue of Liberty: 

 "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-[tossed] to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Let us be the lamp of hope, as we offer freedom from want, charity toward all, and acceptance among us.