'How do we explain ICE to our children?"| Opinion
https://www.pressherald.com/2026/08/08/how-do-we-explain-ice-to-our-children-opinion/
"Amal, age 6, and her 2-year-old sister have been distraught ever since their father was taken by ICE. They cry at length in the morning because their father was the one who made them breakfast and at bedtime because he was the one who tucked them in.
She tells me that Amal woke up that night, the terrible night he was taken. She heard her parents calling back and forth to each other from their apartment to the street below. She got out of bed and looked out the window. There, she told her mother, she saw her father on the sidewalk crying, surrounded by strange men. She saw him forced into a car and driven away.
Her mother tried to protect her, trying to turn the trauma into a palatable story. “Those are just friends of his,” she said. “He is going with them to do paperwork.”
But a 6-year-old puts the pieces together.
Amal looked at her mother and said, “No, those are NOT his friends. I have never seen them before. I KNOW his friends. And he was CRYING. I saw him crying! Those guys TOOK him. I saw them push him into a white car. Our car is black.”
The mother’s instinct to relabel the horror reminded me of the film “Life is Beautiful,” in which a father uses his boundless imagination to try to shield his young son from the horrors of the concentration camp they are in by pretending it’s all an elaborate game. But except in movies, illusions like these fall apart quickly."
~ Karen Levine Egee
No comments:
Post a Comment