on borders, children, ICE concentration camps, and the contemplation of the absurd
“I sank into the thought as into a pool of oil-slicked seawater. All of a sudden in place of the boy with the spiked hair I saw hundreds of faces, some of which I recognized from the photographs that accompanied the earliest press reports on the concentration camps: children, multitudes of them, some too young to walk, others old enough to understand what was happening, torn from their parents, kept in cages, confined for months on end to makeshift cities where every room was windowless like the room where I sat, where they were neglected, treated like cattle, injected with antipsychotics, expected to follow orders and sign papers in a language that they didn’t understand, lied to, misfed, kept away from fresh air, from joy, from beauty, from the petty miseries that are the daily bread of lives that have not been destroyed by imperialism—the quotidian unhappiness, the vague dissatisfaction, the boring, benign, intolerable anxiety that is the privilege of white people.
Told to BREAK THE SILENCE.
Told to REPORT CONFIDENTIALLY.
Told to GET HELP.
Told to KEEP DETENTION SAFE.
I saw their faces, and the faces of their parents, their uncles and aunts, their siblings, their cousins, their friends, the lovers that some of them would have, the children that some of them would have, the multitudes who had been touched and would be touched by the horror of that crime, and the sight made me furious, because along with the faces I saw with perfect clarity that none of it was preordained, that none of it was necessary, that the destruction of all those lives had been the product of a choice, a conscious one, made by a handful of hateful people empowered by a hateful nation and carried out by an army of uniformed nobodies who had credit card bills to pay. The knowledge that those responsible did not know what they did offered no consolation. If anything, it made the crime more painful to contemplate, because it made it absurd. The world teetered between redeemable and irredeemable tragedy; the stakes were nothing less than life’s worth; every new horror risked plunging humanity into a desert with no way stations at all.
Then the law called me by my name: “Mora? Medina Mora?”
My ears rang. My rage evaporated and in its place there arose an ugly combination of hope and fear. My body lifted itself from the chair. The world sharpened, as if I were wearing new glasses. I took a step, then another, taking care to avoid the eyes of the other foreigners. My legs moved. I advanced. What would I be willing to do for a green card? For citizenship? In that moment, I realized, I was ready to do a great deal of betraying. I was surprised by how brittle I’d proven. After just an hour and change in a windowless room, I was all but ready to sell my neighbors.
“I apologize for the wait,” the officer said.
“An American Education”, NICOLÁS MEDINA MORA