How do you feel about the mistreatment of children and infants at the U.S. border?
In the finest constitutional tradition, please join us in expressing citizen concerns to elected representatives. Also, you can use these postcards to share your concerns with your friends, and invite your friends to join the process of remembering the best that is in us, and confronting injustice.
This send-to-friend PDF packet contains templates for printing your own protest postcards and window posters.
Signers of the Invitation
Dennis Rivers, Writer Maia, Poet Vijali, Artist
Santa Barbara, CA Isla Vista, CA Santa Fe, NM
Angela Dawn Parker Rev. John Stoner Kiki Corbin
Community Activist Akron, PA Naturopathic Healer
San Rafael, CA
Rev. John Mabry Jeanne Northsinger David Richo, Psychotherapist
Oakland, CA Mother and Community and Writer, Santa Barbara
Activist, Santa Barbara
Rev. Molly Young Brown
Writer and Ecology Activist
Mount Shasta, CA
Invitation to Participate
These are times that try people’s souls.
An America that kidnaps and mistreats infants and children, no matter where they were born, is not the America I signed up for. And it is probably not the America you signed up for, either. Please print the included postcards and use them to tell your Senators and Representative that America can do better. Also, communicate with as many Senators and Representatives as you possibly can, not just those of your State, and discuss the crisis of government-implemented child abuse with your friends and neighbors.
Image from Democracy Now video
What are WE going to do about this? One problem with living in a democracy is that we are responsible for what the government does on our behalf, and with our tax dollars. How comfortable are you with the U.S. Government mistreating children on your behalf? Really…
Scholars disagree about who might have said (approximately), “All that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing.” But whether it was Edmund Burke or John Stuart Mill or somebody else, they are talking to us right now.
We take two painful lessons from history. The first is that tyranny, by slow degrees, implicates everyone as passive accomplices in its cruelties. The second is that whatever is done to the powerless, will eventually be done to everyone. If we allow prison camps for children to grow in America, it may well be our own children and grandchildren who will be the future prisoners.
Beyond sending protest postcards, please visit your representatives in person and insist that they find a better way of sheltering immigrant families. If we can put a bunch of people on the moon, we can certainly put a desperate family in a safe and sheltering space. That’s what we sing about when we sing, “Oh beautiful, for spacious skies…”, our capacity to do the right thing.
As a community activist in Santa Barbara recently said: “They are all our children. No. Wait a minute. That’s not enough! They are all my children.”
Thank you for taking these deep concerns to heart.