Echoes of Danger

            I think I need to weigh in on the concentration camp/ detention center debate. In the field of genocide studies, one key tenet is that you should not compare devastation; inhumanity is inhumanity, dehumanizing is dehumanizing, misery is misery. Likewise, compassion is compassion. The scale may be different. The situation may be different. The marginalized group may be different. But it is not a contest of who had it worse. It is a question of what we can do to make sure “never again” really means “never again”.
              What happened in the concentration camps in Europe was and continues to be an outrage. I am inspired by the survivors I have met and know that I would not have had their strength. Some of the concentration camps evolved into extermination camps; unchecked, the evil expanded. 
     
        The US had its own concentration camps. The name may have been different (internment camps) but the mass deportation of people to close quarters with constant shortages and limited communication/mobility is concentrating people together to separate them based on a perceived threat. I do not want to compare what the Japanese Americans experienced to what the Polish Jews experienced, and I don’t want to compare the suffering of the Polish Jews to the Roma families under Nazi rule. I know the facts. I know that children were cheated of healthy childhoods in all these cases and so many more.
                  So now we have families trying to be safe from gangs or drugs or civil war. Some of them legitimately need asylum, and international law (plus the American spirit) has requirements about refugee assistance. (We failed miserably in the Holocaust. Will we fail miserably for other people in need?) While figuring out if individual families need assistance, our government is containing them in prison-like quarters, denying them basic human rights, and separating families with young children. 
                I don’t know the solution, but I know that THIS ISN’T IT. We don’t need to say that people had it worse in Germany or Oklahoma or back in Guatemala. We need to see that there are people who knowingly end up in this situation because it is safer than staying in their homeland. They knew the risks of seeking refugee status, but those risks beat the risks of staying. But is this the best we can do? 
                Do we want to go down in history for tearing apart families, for denying medical care to dying children, and for having these detention centers/ concentration camps in the modern world? It doesn’t matter what we call it: what we are facing is an atrocity and people are suffering. What can we do to stop it?

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