Consent to be Cruel

July 2019

We continue to experiment on groups of children, without their consent, without the consent of their parents, and in full view of the public.

Incarcerated, the border war children will not get an impartial ethics committee or an oversight board to demand humane medical treatment.  The architects of this experiment have sequestered the foundation of our democracy – life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness — for themselves; while mauling the most vulnerable with misery, chaos and pain as tools for their work.

And this experiment is not normal. It is a medical experiment wrapped in a policy experiment sold as a social experiment. The data collected will be processed not only by bureaucrats and academics, but by social media, print media, poles and parties.  Experiments seek to answer questions; even immoral ones.  Here, outcomes are evaluated against the internal satisfaction of its architects; modified, and retested: Separation, isolation, next…   

During my 25 years of work in Emergency Departments and ambulances, I have never seen measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, small pox or polio. They’ve been successfully vaccinated out of any practical relevance;as has their very real cost in dollars and suffering.

And I’ve seen the reverse. As the ED night nurse in Bozeman, Montana, one terrible shift, half a dozen of us worked for two hours, all aggressively attempting to resuscitate a baby who died of meningitis.  Living when I began my shift, and dead and a few hours later, we immediately launched an intensive search to medically screen and treat everyone in contact with the child to prevent it from spreading. And even with that exhaustive precaution, a small cluster of patients, centered on a Cody, Wyoming rodeo, 200 miles away and a week before, was identified our source.  Now, with over a decade of meningitis vaccines, this horror managed.

However, the next trial of the experiment, seems to be the threat of biological abuse.

The restriction of vaccines on incarcerated, poorly nourished, stressed, exhausted border war children will make perfect vessels to incubate diseases. Their bodies will be easily overwhelmed, allowing, for the first time in generations, care providers to treat advanced cases of childhood diseases they’ve likely never seen.

Children’s faces grossly distorted with mumps, the pasty tongue of diphtheria, the rattling chests filled with pneumonia.  But a meningitis outbreak, with its insane infectious nature — it’s insane mortality and morbidity: the child’s body, overwhelmed, stripped naked, trunk covered in a red rash; now the baking medical lights on limp limbs mottled blue-white from blood shunted to a dying core; now so many tubes; and now three, and four, and five sets of hands, each as big as the dying torso, bringing years of skills to a match they now cannot win; now this. This, over and over, as disease cohorts with the border war children.

We’ve said, this experiment is immoral.  Its effects could well be catastrophic.

The border war children will not stay incarcerated forever, regardless of rhetoric. In severe illness, they have moved into our community or city hospitals, stressing staff and resources. Some, unknown if they are infectious or not, will move directly into our neighborhoods, surprising hospitals miles from the border.

But the real horror of this situation are the children slammed into the slums of El Salvador or Honduras or Guatemala or Mexico. Mixing with an impoverished populace already in poor condition, clusters of infections will inevitably be turning into regional epidemics.  As a defeated healthcare system spew this population of partially treated patients into slums, the most virulent diseases, breeding in poverty, will combine into superbugs.  Panicked communities will move en masse, inextricably pushing a lethal epidemic back onto our own shores.

With increasing clarity, Josef Mengele is arising within the cold intent of the state. In the heart of the border policy is need for cruelty by its architects.  Cruelty to those incarcerated not as deterrence but as symbols of fear and chaos.  And the ever increasing misery the administration applies, amplifies the panic, the need for salvation by its very perpetrators. 

We have seen waves of state cruelty – Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and now the border war kids.   But they are being buffeted by the counter current of public outrage and the grinding tools of our democracy.  The architects of this cruelty are flailing around, trying to improve their methods, and in doing so, exposing the deep, obscene nature of their experiment.

But in this, time is not in favor of individual children and the public at large. Cruelty over time corrupts our sense of decency and erodes years of work to create our more perfect union.  Cruelty is the tyrants test for people.   We have seen the peoples of the world fill streets and blaze a path whose trailhead is based in our US democracy.  We started this, it is our heritage and in our nature to rise to this test.  We, the people, can move from clusters of resistance, to an epidemic of decency.  The world is begging a pandemic of humanity.  A humanity that is the basis of our democracy.