#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Boston Public Garden, Swam Boat

Again, today, my walk split in two: first, with Charlie in the woods, then, at noon, after parking in Boston, I walk a couple of miles to Boston Common where I meet my poetry friends, Jenny and Gale, and we go to the rally for reuniting families separated at the border during Zero Tolerance. The heat, the sun beating on the heads of the mighty crowd, is brutal and mimics, in its tiny way, the enormous brutality of this policy of creating chaos for vulnerable parents and children, who are now hopelessly entangled in a cruel bureaucracy. 

Of all the news I have watched and read these past weeks, it was Teri Gross's interview with Jonathan Blitzer that I listened to on podcast yesterday that moved me most. His description of his interviews with mothers who have been separated from their children is heart wrenching, particularly his observations of what any mother already knows: that separation from one's child is an emotional trauma that causes acute mental, physical, emotional distress of the highest order. And the fact that this policy was applied with soul-less bureaucratic carelessness, designed specifically to cause this kind of distress to mothers and children, is despicable. The absence of a plan to reunite these families is a matter of intolerable injustice.

New Yorker writer Jonathan Blitzer has been in El Paso, Texas, reporting on immigration and family separation. "I've been meeting women who are crying so violently they can barely speak," he says.

Walking back to my car I crossed Boston Public Garden, where families of parents and children peacefully rode the swan boats on a lazy summer afternoon.