My life experience as a ten-year-old boy is now likened to looking through a window dimly. But I now have the perspective of looking through the eyes of a four-year-old grandson. I’ve read that we humans can be rather impassionate about seeing headlines of thousands of other beings in desperate circumstances. But when we're confronted with an image of just one of these unfortunates, it becomes much more personal. So it was when I first viewed a widely circulated internet video of a young ten-year-old Nicaraguan boy who had been abandoned by a group attempting to cross the US border without going through the lengthy legal process numerous others had already started. At last estimate, they numbered around 20,000 unaccompanied children and counting!
Countless people have now watched this video and in reading
many of their reactions the predominant operative word used is “heartbreaking”. What unimaginable and desperate circumstances
would prompt parents to subject their children to be turned over to “coyotes”
and cartels at a ransom cost to expose them to human traffickers and sexual
assault without their presence? And as
our overwhelmed homeland security officers attempt to control this onslaught,
our own children in this country are in need of the same assistance these
children’s parents are seeking at great risk.
This young South American boy was abandoned by the migrant
group as he slept. An off-duty border
agent found him sobbing and wandering in the desert alone, afraid of being
kidnapped or worse. The thousands like
him become statistics in the news for all of us living apart from the border,
but this boy gives the crisis a tragic face to remember. If the intent of opening our borders was
sincere, there must have been little thought of “unintended consequences.” If political positions were put ahead of well-considered
humanitarian solutions that can be passed by all parties, then God must certainly
be crying with both the boy and all of us.
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