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I've been processing this news for the past ten hours, and I keep coming back to the same thing. It's all I can think about, really.
When I served in the military, we would often do ruck marches, especially if you're in the infantry. (thread)
When I served in the military, we would often do ruck marches, especially if you're in the infantry. (thread)
You put on a 35 lbs. rucksack with full gear and march distances of 12, 15, 18 miles (sometimes more) at a brisk pace, and it was a point of pride to do that well a handful of times a year. It's exhausting. It really tests your fortitude.
Because our feet would be covered with blisters, our muscles would ache, and some among us, soldiers with peak physical conditioning, would pass out from dehydration or exhaustion. You get what I'm saying? Marching just 12 miles with that gear could break you in half.
I say that because the distance between San Pedro Sula, near the northern border of Honduras, and McAllen, Texas right on the southern border of the United States is about 1,442 miles.
Even for a physically-fit adult fleeing horrific violence and persecution, walking 10 hours a day at a typical pace of 3 miles an hour, it would take 48 days to make that distance on foot.
Now add children. Add persons with disabilities. Add those with pregnancies. Factor in weather and food scarcity and water scarcity and a lack of access to necessary medical care.
Factor in vulnerability to violence and discrimination on the basis of gender identity, sexual orientation, and race, among other things.
Take all of that into account and answer me this: what kind of violence and persecution is so horrific and devastating that it would force vulnerable people to make that trip? So dire that walking by foot up the entire east coast of Mexico is the only option you have left?
The past two years have seen unprecedented attacks by the Trump-Pence administration on vulnerable communities, and by far, among the most vulnerable people in this onslaught have been undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. Children. Babies.
I search my soul for answers, and at the end of day, I don't understand how the Republican Party and certain justices and the folks in the White House, all of them professed Christians, would so readily toss away the words of Christ and turn away suffering people like trash.
Justice Sotomayor, in a dissent against the majority's opinion, wrote: “The rule the government promulgated topples decades of settled asylum practices... affects some of the most vulnerable people in the Western Hemisphere — without affording the public a chance to weigh in.”
I do not believe America's reputation will recover in my lifetime. We will be known for the blatant, intentional cruelty inflicted on the vulnerable by this White House and the GOP. We will be known as the nation that created suffering just for the sake of its existence. /thread
