Rotten, Wormy Apples on the Ground

My naivete has dropped off the tree like an October apple pitted from insects and rotten on one side from an early frost.

All my adolescent fascination with how ‘normal’ people signed up for a free brown shirt and a chance to terrorize Jews in 1930’s Germany has been obliterated. I am not that little flower anymore.

Oh, I know we have some bad dudes in this country. People who will trap you at a red light and come at you with a gun to take your car. I know about grifters and drunks, liars and thieves, about deranged parents who decided to drive their car loaded with toddlers off a cliff. There’s a reason my husband carries a hatchet in the side panel of his truck and it’s not because he’s looking for firewood.

I see the news reports of men in plain clothes and masks arresting immigrants, strongarming them on the street, and bundling them into waiting cars to be taken to secret locations where their family and lawyers can’t find them, and I think is this happening in America? I read about Homeland Security deporting children who are U.S. citizens, and I wonder why there wasn’t one person in authority who was compelled by conscience to say, “Hey, wait a minute. This isn’t right?” I want to shout at the masked men manhandling immigrants sent to the hideous prison in El Salvador, “Do you want your mother to see what you’re doing to other human beings?

Are these guys going home and watching themselves on the news? Are they high-fiving each other at the bar? Do they talk about their day at the dinner table? Who they arrested and how they really made them scared? Or does shame wake them up at night, make them turn on the light to see what time it is, and wish they could go back to sleep, but they can’t. The shame is a thousand sharp needles. Maybe. I wish. I have no way of knowing.

I said I wasn’t naive anymore, but I lied. I was just talking tough.

All these things are killing me.

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Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash