Photo from: https://bramante-it.com/myrtle-beach-seashells
Some of
my most salient memories from my childhood are of time spent with close family
friends. In this family, there are four daughters; the two eldest are close in
age with me, and the two youngest are close in age with my sister, so
throughout our lives, the six of us have always greatly enjoyed each other's
company. In fact, in adulthood, these four women can be counted among some of
my dearest personal friends as each one is an exceptional woman in her own
right.
As I
canvas through my childhood memories in my mind's eye, I see a collage of
manifold instants in time that the six of us spent in each other's company,
most of them joyous, some of them poignant, and all of them memorable and
significant. Of all of these snapshots in time, many of them come from
vacations that our families took together. The setting of this particular
memory takes place during our family trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, when
I was about seven-years-old. From this trip, one memory stands out more than
any other.
One afternoon,
when our parents brought us to the ocean, I noticed how the tide that day had
yielded a very auspicious harvest of seashells, which were strewn about the
shore as far as the eye could see. I remember thinking how the shore that day
looked as though a kaleidoscope had burst, scattering all of its colored pieces
along the shore, or as though, perhaps, a rainbow had exploded, leaving about
tiny vestiges everywhere in sight. Given my special penchant for exploring
nature, while all of my other little companions were splashing and giggling on
the shallow bank of the ocean, I grabbed my plastic pail and began to collect
these multi-colored seashells. I immediately went to work in scooping up as
many shells and stones as I could get my greedy hands on.
Initially,
I was careful to remain on that same small section of the shore where my
friends were wading in the shallow water under the eight watchful eyes of our
parents, but within a few minutes, I became mesmerized and completely engrossed
by these glistening shells that looked to me like tiny fragments of a shattered
rainbow. Each time I would grab a shell, I would take a step, gently pick up
the shell, hold it gingerly in the palm of my hand, admire the way it glistened
in the sunlight, and delicately place it in the pail. At one point, I remember
finding a shell that, to me, resembled a robin's egg with its pale blue color
and speckles. As I picked it up and admired it, I turned to one of my
little companions to show it to her only to realize that she was nowhere to be
found.
As I
looked around, I became cognizant of the fact that this had been the first time
I had looked up in probably around a quarter of an hour as I had gotten so
engrossed in this bountiful array of tiny, rainbow-colored vestiges. A cursory
look at my surroundings caused me to see that I was surrounded by a sea of
unfamiliar faces. I no longer recognized the part of the shore where I stood,
and I had apparently wandered off rather far without even noticing.
Now, I
would like to point out here that this was not the only time in my childhood
that I would find myself in this position. It wasn't that I was an unruly
child; I usually minded my parents and did as I was told, but I always had this
dreamy, pensive nature that caused me to become distracted and completely lost
in my own thoughts. In fact, my aunt in Italy still tells the story of how I
one day wandered off while collecting snails and flowers on my grandmother's
farm in Italy, leaving everyone terrified that I had fallen into the well on
the property. This proclivity to become lost in my own reverie is a quality
that even in adulthood, I have never quite managed to grow out of.
This
incident on the beach, however, was particularly terrifying because I was in a
place that was completely unfamiliar and surrounded by strangers, and in that
moment, my tiny body went numb. I dropped my pail that contained the colorful
fruits of that afternoon's search, and I began to tremble. I remember that I
went to speak, but my mouth had gone as dry as the sand beneath my feet. As I
looked around me, the smiling, familiar faces that I had seen just minutes ago
had been replaced by the indifferent and seemingly menacing glances of
strangers, and the once tranquil whisper of the ocean was now replaced by the
threatening shout of the high waves beating belligerently against the shore. In
that brief moment, I stood there feeling helpless and paralyzed by fear.
Thankfully,
after what was probably no longer than two minutes, I heard the familiar voices
of my parents, who had been worried sick. On seeing me, they both came
sprinting toward me, their complexions both as wan as the ivory-colored shell I
had just placed in my pail. "Mammi," my mother said, her voice
shaking, "we were worried!" In all honesty, hearing my mother use
that small endearment further put me at ease, for it cued me into the fact that
my parents' frustration with me for having wandered off causing them to worry
was fortunately, in this moment, eclipsed by the overwhelming relief that they
felt on finding me. In fact, I remember that my mother held on tightly to me as
we walked back.
The three
decades that have passed since this incident on the beach have not served to
diminish the guilt that I still feel as a result of this memory, for I don't
believe that I'll ever truly forgive myself for doing this to my parents. Of
course, I can only accurately recount the incident from my perspective, and I
can tell you it was frightening. Often children, especially when they are
afraid, tend to have a very distorted concept of time, and those couple minutes
that I stood there waiting for my parents to find me felt as though I were
waiting for all of the sand on that beach to gradually slip through the narrow
center of an hour glass. When we panic, our minds often go to the darkest
places, and in that moment of childish fear, I actually imagined that I would
never see my parents again.
As
frightening as these few moments were for me, however, it genuinely pains me to
try to imagine what must have passed through my parents' minds in the few
minutes that they were searching for me. Given that I didn't yet know how to
swim at the time, they must have been plagued by the horrifying possibility
that I could have drowned. They must have inevitably been torturing themselves
in their own minds without saying the words aloud to each other, mercilessly
berating themselves for allowing me to wander off without them noticing, even
though this honestly would have been very easy to do. With us six scrawny little
girls, with our brightly-colored swimsuits and bouncy, brown pony-tails, we
must have been unidentifiable as we played on the shore.
These past
few months, upon hearing the stories that have been circulating of migrant
children who were detained and separated at the border from their parents, most
of whom were seeking asylum in the US, it seems as though I've been replaying
this short incident from my childhood in my mind on a continuous loop, often in
excruciating detail. Through it all, the most painful thought that just will
not go from my mind is this: that day on the beach, only a couple of minutes
passed that I realized that I had been separated from my parents, and for my
parents, it was most likely fewer than ten minutes that they were searching for
me, but in those few minutes, time stood still for all three of us as the fear
brought about by uncertainty was crippling. Now, if I give my morbid curiosity
free reign to even begin to imagine the immeasurable terror and anguish felt by
both parents and children separated in a foreign land, without even the promise
of being reunited, suddenly, I can’t breathe. Even when the policy that
separated migrant families was reversed on June 20, it is estimated that over
2,000 children still have yet to be reunited with their parents.
For some of
these children, various factors have rendered reunification with their parents
almost impossible. Firstly, there is the fact that efficient records were not
kept to identify which children belong to which parents, and many of the
children are too young to know their parents’ full names, so now DNA tests are
having to be issued to identify to which families these children belong. To add
insult to injury, it is now being reported that the parents themselves are
responsible for paying for these tests. Secondly, it has been confirmed that
many parents have also been deported while having to leave their children
behind in the United States, making it exceedingly more difficult to reunite
them. Also, in recent weeks, many migrant children have been transferred to
various different foster homes and detention centers around the United States,
ensuring that the children are now many miles away from their parents and much
more difficult to locate. One of the most heart-rending stories that was
reported this past week, to add further trauma and anguish for both children
and parents alike, claims that in some cases, very young children that are
finally reunited with their parents after several months are met with the
horrifying reality that they no longer remember their parents.
So often
when stories like this are made public, they are met with callous remarks, such
as, “If they only stayed where they were with their problems, none of this
would have happened,” or “What horrible parents they are for putting their
children at risk!” The reality that the people who generally reiterate these
inane talking points fail to understand is that from where most of us stand on
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, few of us will ever truly conceive of the level of
desperation that caused these parents to take such risks. We will never fully
comprehend the tyranny of poverty, hunger, and violence and the power that
these elements have to annihilate our inhibitions, rendering us willing to take
immeasurable risks to ensure the survival of our families. We have to imagine
that many of these individuals are aware of the xenophobia that pervades our
current socio-political climate but are willing to put their children and
themselves through these risks anyway because their love for their children has
led them to this inconceivable level of desperation. Many have reached a point
where none of the perils that they fear may await them in this country seem
more frightening than the risks that they know await them at home.
Besides the
overwhelming pity that I feel for these separated families, another
disillusioning byproduct of this infinitely difficult situation is the fact
that for the first time, I have been forced to acknowledge the jarring reality
that not every individual possesses empathy. Up until this point, all my life I
had believed that the element of compassion is an inherent characteristic that
is a homogeneous aspect of the human experience for every individual. I don’t
believe that anything has ever made me so acutely aware of how naïve I had
always been. What is more is that, even though it hurts me to admit this, even
to myself, I wasn’t prepared for the great distance that this disparity in
empathy was going to create between myself and people whom I have always loved
and respected. It seems as though, as of late, I just don’t recognize people I
once used to feel that I knew so well, and this never fails to leave me feeling
alone and full of despair.
A few weeks
ago, for instance, I noticed that some of my friends were circulating a post on
social media that suggested that we are wrong in wasting empathy on these
migrant children when there are children of fallen American soldiers and police
officers who have also been separated from their parents because their parents
have died protecting our safety and freedom. In short, I was dumbfounded; I’m
not even sure how this type of logic works, to be quite honest. I just cannot
fathom that even in adulthood, I have to explain to others that compassion is
not a pie; that is, if I give a portion of my compassion to one cause, this
does not mean that I will not have a sufficient amount left to give to others.
In college, for example, I had a friend whose father was killed in active duty.
My heart still breaks for her to this day. Not a day goes by that I don't pray
for her, and I would give anything if I could have the power to bring her
father back. This doesn’t, in any way, diminish the pity I feel for these
migrant children. Empathy is an unlimited resource, or at least, it is to me.
This
flippant attempt to try to justify these senseless acts, however, is just one
of the many with which I’ve been inundated these past few months. Homeland
Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, for instance, implied a few weeks ago
that the act of separating families was not as horrific as the media was making
it seem, for in detainment, the children have access to television. Fox News
host, Laura Ingraham, claimed, on a segment of her show, that the detention
centers for migrant children were “essentially summer camps.” Moreover, another
Fox News pundit, Brian Kilmeade, tried to assure us that we should not be
overly concerned about how these children are treated, for after all, “like it
or not, these aren't our kids.” He then added, it isn’t as if this was being
done “to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another
country." I believe that of all of the asinine statements that I’ve heard
used to justify this situation, this last one, the comment made by Kilmeade, is
by far the most dangerous. History has taught us what horrific consequences
dehumanizing a group of people by scapegoating them while labeling them as “the
other” and fostering an “us versus them” mentality can have. We need only to
look at Nazi Germany to see the tragic consequences of this ideology as so
often the indescribably inhumane treatment of the Jews was justified by
reassuring the public that such atrocities would only be allowed to happen to
the Jews, this group of people who were different from them in every way. In
any case, hearing these vapid excuses for the maltreatment of these children
simply reminds me that this is how ignorant we sound when we struggle to
justify something that is completely unjustifiable.
In recent
days, it’s been such an ongoing struggle for me to accept the fact that I am
never going to succeed in making another individual feel empathy, for empathy
is a thing that we are either innately born with, or we’re not. It would most
likely be easier for me to explain colors to someone who was born blind than to
explain the concept of compassion to someone that is incapable of feeling it.
Although it’s difficult, I have to forgive myself for losing respect for
certain people whom I once greatly respected. I have to learn to have patience
with individuals who actually try to use politics to justify this heartless
behavior and try to simply explain to them that feeling compassion for these
children, unlike tax cuts or trickle-down economics, is not a partisan issue.
If you find that leaving a child petrified and alone to punish the child’s
parents for ANY reason is a valid and acceptable strategy to solve immigration
issues, we don’t have different political opinions; we have different values.
Then, for
those friends that constantly tell me that they want to refrain from taking
sides in this debate, I need the courage to explain to them that with their
silence, they have already taken a side. As Holocaust survivor and renowned
writer Elie Wiesel once said, “We
must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Sometimes silence in
itself wields the power to cause more harm than any word in the English lexicon.
Weeks ago, audio clips were released that captured the voices
of both children and parents as they were separated at the border. For some
reason, perhaps partly because I’m a bit of a masochist in my way, I forced
myself to listen to them. A few seconds into the first one, I couldn’t take it
anymore, and I muted it. The few seconds that I listened to were a
heart-wrenching cacophony of doleful sobs. Amid the terrified cries of the
children, the voice of an ICE agent can clearly be heard saying in a
perniciously mocking tone, “Well, we have an orchestra here.” The
faint cry of a small child can be heard plaintively pleading, “Mamita,”
and somehow, all at once, my eyes well up, and I feel my body go numb. I am no
longer a grown woman; I am once again that seven-year-old girl alone on the
beach, feeling lost and afraid. Suddenly, all I hear is the oppressive
sound of the waves aggressively crashing against the shore. Around me, all I
see is a sea of unfamiliar faces and shattered rainbows scattered on the ground.
-- Daniella
Rossi
