Skip to main content

Hundreds of lone children kept in cages... When fact follows fiction.

It's a surreal thing to read a news article that sounds like the synopsis for Adaline.

One of the news stories that was in my feed today was the story of unaccompanied children being kept in chain link cages by Homeland Security due to illegal entry to the United States. The gist of the article, if you haven't read it, is that families who have been found to be entering the U.S. illegally are being detained. While the parents or guardians of the children are awaiting trial, their children are being sent to detention centers where they are kept in large chain-link encased holding areas. 

In Adaline, children are born into an automated society where humans are essentially bred and then curated. A collection of perfect human clones, groomed and cared for by their robot overlords for no other reason than that's what the A.I. is programmed to do. But in the real world, the kids kept in cages aren't being curated. They're being held in limbo while they wait for an unknown period of time, awaiting a fate that is both unknown and frightening.

Of course, this isn't the first time concentration camp style mass imprisonment has been used in the U.S. In Wold War II we rounded up Japanese Americans because we were sure they were in cahoots with the Japanese government who'd bombed Oahu, Hawaii. Back then, legality of residence wasn't even a consideration. Our government detained our own citizens as a knee jerk reaction for being caught off guard by a military attack.

What's interesting, comparing these two historical times, is that when the U.S. thought its own citizens were working against it, it housed families together. And now, when the emotional crisis is much less severe, the solution has been to separate children from their parents. 

In Adaline, the children have no parents. That is, they've never had them. Humans are lab experiments that are born of a petri dish. I wonder if it's more damaging to have the warmth and care of a parent stripped away, or to not know the comfort of a family at all. 

For reference, the article that I read is here: Hundreds of lone children kept in cages

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Don't Wait

I awoke Friday morning to a message from someone whose name was only vaguely familiar. Laying in bed, scrolling through Facebook on my cell phone, I opened the message. It was a quick note from a woman who was good friends with a woman who I have been close to for over a decade. I read it, and reeled with shock. My friend, a woman who had been with me through the best and worst of times, is gone. Taken from this life because of a driver who didn't stop at a stop sign on a country road. "Accidents happen," many say. It's true, but it isn't right. We never know when our time is going to be up. Today might be your last day, or mine. There's no way of predicting what will happen tomorrow... this evening... fifteen minutes from now. There are many tragedies stemming from this simple accident. First, a mother with fierce love of her two teenage children was stolen from them. A woman who was a pillar of support for so many has fallen from their list of who to cal...
2 comments
Read more

Proofing.

The first printed copy of A Giraffe in the Room has arrived in my office. The giant "Proof" stamp is wonderful to see, and I am looking forward to picking through the pages to make sure that the novelette is ready to be released commercially. Every time writing takes a step forward - whether it is the completion of a piece, reading through editing mark ups for the first time, or getting a print proof in the mail, it is a wonderful feeling. I hope that everyone who finds their passion gets the chance to feel the pride of taking a step forward.  I will say that at under 50 pages, I think A Giraffe in the Room looks a little bit like a pamphlet that someone would hand you through the open crack of your screen door as they try to tell you about the Good News. Other than the brevity of the thing (it is a novelette, after all), I'm very pleased with the little bit of it that I've had a chance to look over. I hope to comb over it this week, and estimate that copies ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Missing Deadlines

Life - not only is it the final frontier, but sometimes it is also a whirlwind. These days, I feel an awful lot like Toto in the Wizard of Oz. It is like I've been shoved in a basket and taken through the tornado to a land that looks like nothing I have ever seen before. My husband and I made the difficult decision to close down our retail store and move the whole business back home. That has translated into weeks (or months?) of sorting, selling, packing and storing everything that the business has owned. Right now, there is a mountain of inventory, paperclips, toddler-work-toys and extension cords rising up from the floor of my living room. I have rehomed a fraction of the mountain in the last two weeks, and I hope that eventually I will muster up the courage and energy I need to tackle the rest of it. Add to that weeks upon weeks of birthdays, holidays, the start of summer... and writing has gotten pushed far down the list of priorities. Not that I'd be able to writ...
Post a Comment
Read more