Our office recently received an email offer from a company touting itself as having “Trump-friendly editorial cartoons.” Inside was their most recent, depicting a family arriving at the Mexico-United States border and stopping a few feet away with the words: “How to Avoid Being Separated From Your Children at the U.S. Border … Step 1: Stay Away. The End.”
For so many people who have turned our nation’s politics into some sort of “our side, your side” football game and “picked” the extreme right-wing side, that probably makes sense. Don’t want to be separated? Don’t try to cross the border.
They go about their daily lives, thinking they are justified in not caring that our nation, in our names, is literally caging children and ripping babies from their mothers’ breasts. They think they’ve got it all figured out. It’s the parents’ fault, right? So, not their problem.
If you’ve ever had even a basic history lesson about the Holocaust, you may recognize the terms “Bystanders” and “Upstanders.”
Bystanders were the people who saw the injustices being carried out by the Nazis — who maybe witnessed Jewish families being shoved into ghettos “for their own good” — and did nothing, said nothing. They didn’t actively partake in the violence, but they didn’t try to stop it, either.