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While We Worried About Imaginary Children

While We Worried About Imaginary Children

Last updated on: September 13, 2020 at 1:13 am by Mary Pezzulo

While We Worried About Imaginary Children 2020-09-13T01:13:03-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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Over the weekend, it’s been revealed that our nation has expelled 8,800 unaccompanied minors back into Mexico without a hearing.

This is due to President Trump’s coronavirus restrictions, that have effectively ended asylum. We have always been despicable to people who come to us for help. We’ve committed a humanitarian nightmare, on purpose, in order to traumatize children as an example to anybody who wants to come to us for help. The pandemic has given us the opportunity to be despicable in a new way. 159,000 people have been turned away and sent back to Mexico at the nation’s Southern border without a hearing. Eight thousand, eight hundred of those people are children traveling alone.

Can you imagine eight thousand, eight hundred children?

Can you imagine a thousand children?

Can you even imagine a hundred children?

COVID-19, as we all know, originated in China. It came to the United States along with Americans who had traveled from China on planes and boats. It didn’t come from Mexico, or through Mexico from Central or South America. Mexico has less than half the cases we do– they have more to fear from Americans, at this point, than we do from them. But we took COVID-19 as an excuse to expel 159,000 people from our country. Eight thousand, eight hundred of them were minors traveling alone. They are traveling alone on the Mexican side of the border now.

We had a record heat wave at the border this summer, while all this was going on.

This weekend we also found out the identity of the developer of one of the most popular Q Anon conspiracy websites. He has been identified as Jason Gelinas, and he lives in New Jersey. Shortly after he was identified, the website was taken down. This has gotten a lot of news coverage because Q Anon is big news.

Q Anon is a wildly popular conspiracy theory, claiming that Donald Trump is engaged in a battle against a “deep state” ring of Satanic pedophile child traffickers associated with Hollywood and the Democratic party. There’s no evidence for any of this, just rumors and hysteria, but that doesn’t matter. When you believe a conspiracy theory, everything including blatant evidence to the contrary is interpreted as part of the conspiracy. Lately, conspiracy theory enthusiasts have been holding protests around the country expressing their belief in the conspiracy and demanding that something be done about it. People can get mixed up because sometimes the protests look like demonstrations against child trafficking in general. Child trafficking exists, and it’s horrendous. But these people are all protesting a particular child trafficking ring that does not exist.

While this has been going on, the government sent eight thousand eight hundred children back to Mexico, alone, without a hearing or any court proceedings whatsoever, without help of any kind.

I don’t know where those children are now.

It is so much easier to care about imaginary children than real ones.

Imaginary children don’t have real needs. Their needs are whatever you imagine them to be. You can hold a picket or participate in an internet forum discussion and feel like you’ve done something heroic, and then you can forget about them and go to bed. Real children are messy. They are smelly. You need to feed, clothe, house and bathe them. You need to educate them and make sure they don’t spend too much time playing video games. If they are hurt are traumatized, you’ll need to get them attention from medical and psychological experts, who demand pay. You can’t forget about them and go to bed, because they may wake up crying from a nightmare or with a messy diaper, and you’ll have to get up.

Imaginary children disappear, when you’ve got something else you want to think about, and real children don’t.

Real children continue to exist even if they’re not wanted. Even if you expel them from your country, in a heat wave, in the middle of a pandemic, they continue to exist.

The children being trafficked by the Deep State don’t exist. They are imaginary. Many trafficked children do exist, just not this particular bunch. Something like 1.2 million children are trafficked across the world every year, and trafficking often doesn’t look like what you think it does, so it’s important to know what the common signs are. But the children abused by Satanists in the Q Anon conspiracy theory don’t exist.

One of the things that can happen, when a child is in danger of being trafficked by gangs in foreign countries, is that the parents will send them away. They will send them on a desperate and dangerous journey to the United States, so that they can seek asylum. If they’re granted asylum, they’ll be safer from trafficking, though of course it isn’t a sure thing. If they are sent back, the gangs will traffic them. That’s not the only way a person can be trafficked, of course, but it’s one of them. It used to be that, if they played their cards right, a minor could get asylum in America if they were in danger of trafficking. But next to no one can get asylum now.

Eight thousand, eight hundred children came to the United States for help, and they were sent away into the desert alone. I don’t know where those children are now. I don’t know what they’re suffering. I don’t know how many died of thirst or of heat stroke, or drowned in the Rio Grande, or went back to the places they came from and were murdered or raped or trafficked there. But I know they went on existing even though we didn’t want them, because that’s what real people do.

This happened while so many in my country were worrying about imaginary children, children that don’t exist. Children that don’t exist can’t suffer, unless you want to think about their suffering. When you don’t think about them, they feel nothing at all.

While my country was busy with mass hysteria about imaginary children, eight thousand eight hundred real children were sent away.

That is the country we chose to be. That’s how we’ll be remembered by real people.

And it’s real people that actually matter.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, visit our donate page.

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