I was in my local ice cream store recently. It’s a place I occasionally like to relax in, people-watch groups of friends, families interacting, read a book sometimes.
There was a little boy, maybe 3 or 4 years old, waiting at the counter. Everything about his facial expression said that he was enjoying the moment, secure with his parents beside him, eager for his ice cream to arrive. He was happy.
And then the thought came — how would he look if a total stranger in a uniform picked him up and took him away from his parents? How would he react as the gap between him and them grew bigger and bigger, until they were out of sight and nothing and no one around him was familiar? How would he feel? It was a horrible thought, but it took some dislodging.
That morning, I’d attended a workshop on emotional awareness. We discussed being aware of our own feelings, of how we experience layers of feelings simultaneously and how difficult it is to name them, pinpoint exactly what those feelings are.
Since then I’ve kept pausing to try to understand what it is I am experiencing when I feel uncomfortable, out of sync. With the world? With myself? I can’t choose. I think it’s both.
My mind can be on good things: wandering around the garden, looking at the vegetables thriving in the new raised beds; sitting in a quiet, peaceful space, writing with friends; enjoying the mountain view on my daily walk.
But underneath the sense of well-being lurk layers of emotion that nag and tug, disturb the joy. I can label them as sorrow, anger, frustration, helplessness, and still not reach the bottom layer, the one that demands to be recognized. Distilled into a single word, it is guilt.
After World War II, when the total inhumanity of the Holocaust was spoken of, it wasn’t just Germany that was blamed, but the Germans, a collective noun. Not the bad Germans, not despite the good Germans. In the eyes of the world they had all allowed this terrible thing to happen. Every German was thought of as complicit.
Right now we are the country being judged, by our actions at the Mexican border, our treatment of innocent, innocent children. Tearing apart helpless families fleeing for their lives, locking up parents for trying to keep their children safe, warehousing their children, is viewed with outrage and horror on the international stage.
When this abomination is spoken of, it will be what Americans are allowing on their home soil, what evil Americans collectively are enabling. No matter that everyone I know personally is distraught by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s actions based on our government’s inhumane policies — in the history books we will all be remembered as being complicit.
I see images on the electronic media — children locked up in cages, lying on concrete floors with next to no physical comforts, children surrounded by strange faces and often a language they do not understand. I hear the audio of their anguished cries. It’s heartbreaking.
When I cannot watch or listen any more, I turn them off and soak in the comfort of my surroundings – my nice home, my family, my pictures, books and things I love. And then I think that this is how it was with the Warsaw ghetto. The Poles going about their daily lives alongside the cruelty and inhumanity imposed on other human beings right on their own doorstep.
Each time I pause to take note of where I am, what I am doing, what I am feeling, the images and sounds of the children rise up, and the guilt of complicity.
I had family in concentration camps. Inheriting such a history leaves an indelible mark. Now, here on American soil, the unthinkable is happening: children’s concentration camps. Although they are labeled with sanitized names, concentration camps is essentially what they are. And I am complicit.
I’ve read that some have had anti-psychotic drugs forced on them on a daily basis, presumably to render them less distraught, less difficult to manage, and ultimately less able to function as human beings. A kind of living death. And I am complicit.
In the comfort of my home, filled with all that is familiar, I am what I do not want to be. I do not recognize this country any more. And yet I am a part of it and what is done in its name. I am complicit.
I sign petitions, send money to organizations working to help the children and their parents, call legislators, repost images and posters on Facebook in an attempt to change at least one mind that doesn’t see how dreadful this all is. I attend rallies.
And none of it feels enough. Under whatever feelings I experience as I go about my day, the guilt of complicity lies thick and deep.
Claire Day, an expat from northern England, is a retired educator and local writer who lives in Easthampton.