A Mother's Day Hell, From the GOP

Today, as Mother’s Day Weekend began, I watched the sickening video of a hysterical 16-year-old girl with her face smashed into the pavement by police officers, as I.C.E. agents hauled away her mother and newborn baby in Worcester, Massachusetts.

A crowd of rightly horrified and outraged neighbors poured into the street, appealing to a compassion and decency that was nowhere to be found.

This teenage daughter’s life has been irreparably violated, her sense of safety obliterated, her family’s sacred story visited by a horror you and I will fortunately never understand. They are going through hell at the hands of those who vowed to protect and serve them.

This is Trump’s America on this Mother’s Day.

This is the Republican Party’s lawless, merciless shock-and-awe campaign against not just illegal immigrants, not just undocumented people, not just criminals, but against families, against their children, against their spouses, against their fathers, against their mothers.

It’s happening in homes, on college campuses, during traffic stops, in carpool lines, and at local parks. People are being disappeared by this Administration, taken with unnecessarily brutal force by an unhinged and empowered Gestapo-esque monstrosity that feels itself above both the Law and the laws of humanity.

The “Family Values” party is waging a violent war on due process, on probable cause, on elemental human and civil rights, while hundreds of millions of us quickly click away from the videos or bury our heads in tariffed retail therapy, or worse, feel some kind of perverse joy watching a Latino father languishing in an El Salvadorian prison, a college student in a hijab detained without just cause—and a mother and her children traumatized and dehumanized in their neighborhood.

What in the actual hell are we doing, America?
When are we all going to wake up and realize that this is not some crackdown on criminals, that this is not a carefully planned and executed operation to make our streets safer?
When are we going to understand that we are not watching them face justice (whoever we imagine them to be)?
There is no them, there is no they, there is only us. We the f*cking People of this nation, are all in the crosshairs of this vile, corrupt fascist abomination, whether for our nation of origin or the color of our skin or what bathroom we use or what social services we rely on or what retirement benefits we’ve spent our lives paying into.

None of us is safe, and all of us are dependent on the rest of us. We are tethered together.

As news breaks this weekend that the Trump Administration is considering suspending habeas corpus, a legal procedure allowing people under the Law to challenge their detention in court, every single American who claims to be guided by faith, morality, or conscience should be deciding how they are going to step into the fight, which isn’t just a fight for families like the one whose terror was paraded through the streets and on the news—it is a brutal and bloody battle for the nation we want to be and the one we refuse to become.

You and I may be lucky enough not to have to watch our children’s faces being driven into the street or see our parents imprisoned without a crime, but we will all be visited by grief and suffering and theft and violation at the hands of this regime, and we’d better all start getting pissed off enough to push back in ways we never have before.

Don’t look away from the videos.
Don’t bury your head in the sands of distraction.
Don’t wish away a horror that will not leave on its own.
Pick a fucking hill and decide what you’re willing to lose to fight for it.

On this Mother’s Day, this President and this Administration are saying to all mothers and their children and their parents: to hell with you.

And you and I are the only thing left standing in their way.