A Slap In The Face Of Our Nation's Better Angels

While growing up in Ecuador, Italy, and Bolivia, I experienced diverse cultures, ethnicities, and social economies. As a child, it dawned on me that no matter what country I was in, how different people looked, motherhood always looked the same. A mother who was hungry and barefoot in Guayaquil exuded as much love for her children as the fashionably attired mother in Turin. It taught me that a mother’s love is universal.

What saddens me now is that many people in America haven’t a clue that a child in Gaza riddled with bullets was as deeply loved as a child in Los Angeles who has just died from a brain tumor.

As a woman, I know it’s the love we feel deeply that civilizes our world—not church elders, political leaders, or money. It’s this unmitigated love that drives us to seek justice for ourselves, our children, our community—and even for a man we’ve never met who was maliciously sent to a gulag in El Salvador to disappear. Intuitively, we understand that our sons or daughters could also be snatched off the street “by mistake” never to be seen again. And this, of course, is not love. It’s tyranny.

I ask myself, how did we become so callous a nation that even one American can sit back and gloat or applaud this new reign of terror? How can any caring person believe this is how one improves a democracy, or heals a broken society?

Sending anyone to a prison in El Salvador—with or without due process—is a slap in the face of our nation’s better angels. Contrary to delivering us from all evil, as some people like to think, it diminishes us as a thoughtful, creative society and puts us on a tragic par with North Korea’s (and other dictatorships’) unimaginative problem-solving character. The “okayness” of such an atrocity makes a mockery of democracy and throws us into history as one more shameful thug among nations. Above all, it makes us evil.

So what should we do?

There will be many church services this weekend to celebrate the Resurrection. In Christian theology, the Resurrection is not just about Jesus. It’s about all of us. When we truly believe we are each made in the image of God, then we must accept that what we do to another human being we are also doing to God. What is done to Kilmar Abrego Garcia and others like him is done to God. But maybe it's easier to dismiss this part of Christian doctrine these days.

For me, this holiday is an opportunity to pray for our leaders and also ask, what would Jesus do if he were here in my shoes witnessing this new world being born in America—one that imagines itself Christian and nobler than ever, but yet is remarkably cunning and unholy?

What comes to me is this expression: Easy come, easy go. America did not come easy. It’s been hard fought and continues to be. It’s not perfect, but if it’s to remain “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” then we must all help bring that vision to life in all ways imaginable and not be pulled off course by the wicked ideas of one turpid president who should spend more time in church and less time on a golf course frolicking with other godless leaders.