First Light Books
Don't Close Your Eyes
RECEIVED Thu., June 24, 2021
Dear Editor,
To our everlasting shame we, the people of the United States, have fostered institutionalized child abuse on a wholesale basis. It’s not one child, 10 children, nor even a hundred children, but in excess of five thousand children are being abused by our government and we are turning a blind eye to it even though it has been thrust in our faces.
Whether you agree with the administration’s immigration policy or not, every one of us is aware that the migrant children are being held in horrific conditions that would not be tolerated in the worst slums in the United States. Cold, poor or undercooked food, abysmal sanitary conditions, mental abuse, and inadequate sleeping conditions are only the tip of the iceberg. The people responsible know their culpability since the first thing they do is remove belts and shoe laces to prevent suicides.
If any of this were happening in our own city, we would demand that child protective services be called to investigate and bring the guilty parties to answer for their crimes. Even within the prison systems, humane conditions for the treatment of felons are monitored by the state health department. Why then isn’t a squadron of state and federal police being dispatched to break the cone of silence that the perpetrators have put over these gulags?
Armed with search warrants, the press, and cameras, these child abuse sites should be raided.
Can anyone of us not claim that this isn’t a crime against humanity? All that evil requires is that good people do nothing. Then again, if I close my eyes, it will all go away!
To our everlasting shame we, the people of the United States, have fostered institutionalized child abuse on a wholesale basis. It’s not one child, 10 children, nor even a hundred children, but in excess of five thousand children are being abused by our government and we are turning a blind eye to it even though it has been thrust in our faces.
Whether you agree with the administration’s immigration policy or not, every one of us is aware that the migrant children are being held in horrific conditions that would not be tolerated in the worst slums in the United States. Cold, poor or undercooked food, abysmal sanitary conditions, mental abuse, and inadequate sleeping conditions are only the tip of the iceberg. The people responsible know their culpability since the first thing they do is remove belts and shoe laces to prevent suicides.
If any of this were happening in our own city, we would demand that child protective services be called to investigate and bring the guilty parties to answer for their crimes. Even within the prison systems, humane conditions for the treatment of felons are monitored by the state health department. Why then isn’t a squadron of state and federal police being dispatched to break the cone of silence that the perpetrators have put over these gulags?
Armed with search warrants, the press, and cameras, these child abuse sites should be raided.
Can anyone of us not claim that this isn’t a crime against humanity? All that evil requires is that good people do nothing. Then again, if I close my eyes, it will all go away!
Mark E. Ogram
