White House Social Media Summit

Seen here for the first time, shocking footage from the recent White House social media summit.

MAGA hat kid vs chanting Native American. I weigh in.

Do I know with certainty why MAGA-hat kid smirked creepily at chanting Native American man? No, I do not. Neither do those who insist that an innocent kid was victimized by social media gone mad and liberal media turned hateful toward white boys. The kid’s motive is known only to him. It is not a fact that can ever be established.

Here’s what I do know:

1. Donald Trump panders to racists. Not only don’t people who wear MAGA hats mind —  that’s why they wear MAGA hats. They’re the ones to whom he’s pandering. A MAGA hat is a public proclamation of allegiance to a fascist-leaning president who routinely uses “Pocahantas” as an insult and treats Wounded Knee as a joke. To an authoritarian buffoon who whips up fear and support in his base by characterizing Mexicans as violent rapists and urban (read black) America as a pit of crime and depredation. To a corrupt autocrat who rode to power courting white supremacists and who put Breitbart and the alt-right in the White House. To a president who praises foreign dictators and disdains democratic allies. A MAGA hat is a statement, just like a KKK hood is a statement. It speaks volumes. When you are wearing it, you are by definition non-neutral. You are saying something. This is a fact.

2. It’s beyond obnoxious for a Catholic school to send a bunch of teenage boys to protest abortion. If they tell a 14-year-old boy that he is qualified to dictate family-planning morality to adult women, it’s not unreasonable to infer he’s been raised with a sense of privilege that would make him act like an entitled brat when confronted by soapbox extremists and Native American activists. This is inference supported by reason, but not hard fact.

3. A bunch of sheltered Kentucky boys from an overwhelmingly white, largely Republican town came to the Big City. They encountered some batshit-crazy soapbox preachers. In New York, we’d have called that Tuesday. Or possibly Wednesday. Or Any Day. In fact, Black Hebrew Israelites were a Times Square staple for ages. We Coastal Elites know fringe nut jobs when we see them. But of course, if you’ve led a sheltered life in a mostly white, Republican Kentucky town, and been weaned on Fox News, you’d probably think this miserable little group of black men represented an entire race bent on destroying you and your whole way of life. Instead of ignoring them (if you haven’t been moved away from them by responsible adults, as should have happened), you’d engage them, and in your adolescent wisdom, you’d think school spirit cheers were a clever, passive-aggressive way to express yourselves while your MAGA hats do the real talking. Fact-based inference again.

4. Since the D.C. event went viral, other information has emerged about Covington Catholic that reflects a school culture that conforms to what one might expect of an elite Catholic boys’ prep school: sports-obsessed, aggressive bro culture. Whatever you think of this video of a basketball game or this photo (Is that kid in blackface? Are they verbally harassing a black player? Or is it just some school tradition of body paint combined with the usual displays of aggression boys are taught to make at sporting events?), it sure puts into perspective what this school considers to be “school spirit.” Fact, some inference.

5. The first time I ever saw someone whom I could readily identify as Native American was in a Wyoming diner in the mid-1970s. A Native American woman ate while her two young children played on the floor under the table, bothering no one. A white waitress approached the woman and yelled at her to “keep her brats quiet or get the hell out.” It was one of the most blatantly racist moments I’ve ever witnessed. It created a prejudice in me. Ever since, I have been disposed to take the word of a Native American over that of a white person in interpreting the racial subtext of an encounter. Of course, in any given encounter, the Native American could be wrong and the white person could be right. A prejudice is not rational. Personal bias. But...

6. MAGA HAT. FACT.

Would you believe me?

This is about what we remember and what we don’t; what we say and what we don't; whom we believe and whom we don’t. It’s about something that happened to me. It is 100% true, but I could not prove it if my life depended on it. It’s also about Christine Blasey Ford, Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, and Me Too.

Forty years ago, the summer I was 16, I took a trip from New York to California with my older brother, traveling partway by car with friends and the rest of the way by bus, mostly putting up in cheap motels and campsites along the way. That’s how we came to stay one night at a campground in Monterey, California. I couldn’t tell you the date, or the name of the campground, or its exact location. It was, after all, 40 years ago.

We struck up a conversation with the guy at the neighboring campsite, who was alone. I don’t remember his name. We agreed to pool our food and have dinner together. At the time, it seemed like one of those nice things that happen when camping — helping each other out, being neighborly, sharing. My brother and I contributed Hebrew National hot dogs. I don’t remember what he contributed. We ate together by the fire in our campsite, chatting. When we were done, my brother volunteered to go wash the dishes at the outdoor faucet by the bathrooms.

As soon as he was gone, the demeanor of our new “friend” changed completely. I don’t remember what he said, or if he said anything. I just remember that he shoved me across the picnic table, pinned my arms above my head, and smashed his mouth against mine. I remember the feeling of the hard wooden table under my back. I remember our teeth clicking together. I remember being scared. Kicking and squirming, I managed to get out from under him and flee. I ran to the bathrooms and found my brother. I told him what had happened.

I don’t remember my brother’s exact words, but I know he was angry and wanted to confront the man. I told him not to. I didn’t want to make a scene. I told him to just stick with me and not leave me alone. We returned to our campsite. The guy was nowhere to be seen. Presumably, he had retreated to his tent. We got into ours and went to sleep. The next morning, when we got up, he and his tent were gone. There was no sign he’d ever been there. We ate breakfast, broke camp, and continued on our way.

It never occurred to me to report the incident to the authorities. I wouldn't have wanted to disrupt our trip, let alone my life, but I probably didn't even consider that. I simply didn’t think one reported such an event — a near miss. I didn’t think a crime had been committed. It would have been like calling the cops to say that a car whose license number you didn’t get had almost hit you on the highway, but you’d swerved and avoided the collision. It would have been reporting a non-event.

I never mentioned the incident to my brother again. It would have just made him uncomfortable, and anyway, what would have been the point? Nothing had happened.

Except something had. It didn’t damage me in a profound way. I didn’t become phobic, suffer PTSD, or develop an anxiety disorder. But I became much more cautious about being alone with strange men in isolated places. Like all New York girls, I had been raised with the usual warnings: Don’t walk alone at night; don’t get off the subway at the wrong stop; carry your keys sticking through your fingers; don’t walk too close to the buildings where someone can pull you into an alley or doorway; don’t hitchhike; don’t make eye contact; don’t wear revealing clothes; don’t go into bars alone; don’t go to the wrong neighborhood; always carry cab fare; boys only want one thing. So even though I was the sort of person who liked adventure and risk-taking, I took this experience as a check on my reckless nature -- a lesson in sensible precautions. I followed all of the self-defense advice. I cultivated a tough “Do not fuck with me” face, which I wore around the city, especially in the subway. I showed no fear, believing that to show fear was to make oneself vulnerable.

As time went on, I frequently thought about what might have happened if I hadn't gotten away, about what I had narrowly escaped, my understanding of the event increasing as I learned more about the world. Still, I didn’t tell anyone about it. It made me uncomfortable to think about. I probably mentioned it to no one for at least 20 years; the only person I recall specifically telling, even then, was my husband. But it was only recently that I came to think of it explicitly as what it was: an escape from an attempted rape.

When I began writing this, I messaged my brother, asking, “The summer we traveled cross-country, we spent a night at a campground in Monterey. Do you remember anything about that?” His reply: “I certainly remember Monterey but I don’t remember a campground.” And why should he? I’m sure that, at the time, he would have seen the incident much as I did: a close call, a non-event. Since it didn’t happen to him personally, with the accompanying fear and adrenaline, it didn’t impress itself on his memory. And I never mentioned it again. So today, he doesn’t remember it. To him, it never happened. I understand that. I can only imagine how many incidents people have told me about that were significant to them, but that I’ve forgotten completely.

To review: I don’t know the name of my attacker. I don’t know the exact location, other than a campground in the vicinity of Monterey, California. I don’t know the date, other than the summer of 1978. I don’t know details like the time or the weather. I can’t describe the man beyond a vague sense of his height, build, and age. The only corroborating witness I can name doesn’t remember the event. But it happened. As surely as I am alive, it happened.

And if I DID know who that guy was, and if that guy were nominated to the Supreme Court, or ran for president? I’d do whatever I could to make sure people knew what he did that night in 1978.

Would you believe me?

Are we heading toward an American version of Romanian orphanages?

The cruel, inhumane, “zero-tolerance” Trump immigration policy, under which children are taken from their parents at the border, has already been much compared to Nazi Germany. I don’t object. It ought to go without saying that there’s absolutely no point to “Never Again” if one isn’t allowed to invoke the Holocaust until there’s an all-out Holocaust.

The problem I have with the comparison is that it’s too broad to be instructive. Yes, it’s part of Trump’s campaign to vilify and dehumanize a vulnerable population in order to stir ultranationalist sentiment. But what, exactly, does this particular chapter in our history say about who we have become and where we’re headed? I’d like to offer what I think is a much closer and more useful comparison: Romanian orphanages.

In 1991-1992, my husband and I spent nearly a year in Romania, which was just emerging from a Communist regime that was even more brutal and bizarre than what most of the Soviet bloc had experienced. My husband was a newly minted pediatrician when the news reached the West of more than 100,000 Romanian children living in squalid conditions in so-called orphanages. (Many, if not most, were not actually orphans, but had been institutionalized by parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t care for them, but had not relinquished custody.) Worse still, a pediatric AIDS epidemic had spread through those institutions. My husband joined a small group of pediatricians who scraped together some funding for a study, and that’s what brought us to Romania. He gathered data for the study and provided medical assistance in several orphanages and hospitals in Bucharest and Galati; I served as a woman Friday, providing logistical and administrative support to his efforts, alongside my own writing projects.

Perhaps you’ve heard the stories: tens of thousands of children warehoused in facilities where they were, at best, neglected, and at worst, abused. Children up to age six or seven or even more, small with malnutrition, spent their days in white metal cribs, rocking and banging themselves against the bars in an effort to self-stimulate, because no one interacted with them, no one held them, no one played with them. Infants had flattened heads because they spent their whole lives lying on their backs in those cribs. Eerie quiet hung over rooms full of children who never cried, because crying brought no response; no one ever came for them. Children with AIDS were transferred from bleak orphanages to even bleaker hospital wards, where they died not from the disease, but from exposure, because their fatal illness became an excuse to deprive them of even the most basic necessities like clothing, food, and heat.

It’s all true. I was there. I saw it. It was a nightmare of inhumanity.

By all reports, the American institutions where immigrant children are being held today are very different. They are, for now at least, only temporary, and the children receive food and clothing and have access to toys, television, and activities.

But here’s the thing: Once upon a time, the Romanian orphanages weren’t that bad, either. There was a long history of orphanages in Romania, and even in the early Ceausescu years, they had not yet become hellholes. But government policy, dictated by an unhinged megalomaniac with his own strange agenda, created the crisis the world saw when the Iron Curtain fell. Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, determined to increase Romania’s population in order to grow the work force, banned contraception and abortion, causing a spike in unwanted births and the mass abandonment and institutionalization of children. As children poured into the overburdened system, conditions deteriorated. In a nation where propaganda and rumors replaced facts, where people lived in fear, and where resources were scarce, the disaster inside the orphanages went unchecked.

It seems like a stretch right now to compare Trump’s America to Ceausescu’s Romania, but there are important similarities. Trump is another pompous, self-serving, reality-denying leader who implements inhumane policies to further his own bizarre agenda. He rose to power by stoking fear and hatred of immigrants, particularly those from Muslim and Latin American countries. He believes that, by playing the strong man at the expense of vulnerable immigrants, he’ll reinforce his popularity among his virulently xenophobic base. He’s not interested in what happens to the system as a flood of children hits it, and like the Romanian dictator, he lacks the empathy to concern himself with the effect on the children. Also like Ceausescu, he’s demonstrated a singular willingness to pick the pockets of the masses in order to line his own.

Still, these detention centers, which were originally created to house unaccompanied minors who crossed the border before Trump even became president, provide only temporary shelter and are well supplied, right? No one is going hungry, and the kids eventually move on. What’s the fuss?

As many have already pointed out, any forced separation of a child from a parent is traumatic and can have lasting impact. Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in no uncertain terms after visiting a facility in Texas that what the children there had been subjected to was “a form of child abuse.” No amount of food, toys, or TV change that. These aren’t children whose parents don’t want them or who have hurt them. In many cases, they haven’t even committed a crime (seeking asylum is not a crime, which is why previous administrations didn’t prosecute people for it). The practice of separation, in and of itself, temporary or not, is both unethical and damaging to children.

But more than that, numbers tell the story about where we could very well be headed. Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy is bringing more and more children into an already overtaxed system. From October 2017 to April 2018, 700 families were split by the Trump administration, and from April 18 to May 31, 1,995 children were taken from 1,940 adults. The temporary housing facilities are bursting at the seams. The government has already opened one tent city in Texas; more will surely follow. While the policy is to eventually release the children to family members, many of those relatives are undocumented themselves and are afraid to come forward to receive the children, lest they run the risk of deportation. Foster care is an option, but that system, too, will inevitably max out. Now there’s talk of deporting the parents without their children. How long before we see in America the beginnings of Romania’s nightmare scenario: an explosion of institutionalized children left parentless due to stupid government policy, with conditions deteriorating due to underfunding and neglect? It’s not hard to imagine. We’re already hearing about staff who believe they’re not supposed to pick up or handle young children, who are being left to cry inconsolably for their absent parents. Maybe it would never become the living hell that Romanian orphanages became, but how close is too close for comfort?

And then you have to wonder: Who would work in such places, and how would they treat the children?

When we first arrived in Romania, my husband and I were plagued by one question: How could anyone treat children like this? The caregivers, administrators, and medical staff came to work every single day and maintained a status quo that made outsiders sick to their stomachs. We didn’t personally observe any physical abuse, but what we did see was more than enough: rows of cribs filled with undersize children with vacant eyes who were permanently developmentally delayed and whose most basic needs were not being met.

Not only did orphanage workers fail to show any tenderness or compassion toward their charges; many stole what little they had. Again and again, we heard the stories from foreign aid workers. One in particular stands out. Soon after the fall of Ceausescu, a group of Dutch nurses arrived at a hospital in Galati to work in its pediatric AIDS ward, where HIV-positive children were transferred from the local orphanage to live out their final months. The nurses brought with them many donated supplies, which they stored on the premises, and they retrained the Romanian staff, who began to demonstrate a more caring attitude toward the children. But early on, the nurses made a critical mistake: The entire group traveled to the Netherlands for several days to attend a conference. When they returned, everything they’d brought was gone: medicine, clothing, blankets, even the electric washing machines. They had to start over from scratch.

Eventually we, like all the other aid workers we encountered, began to understand the twisted logic by which this world operated. First, there was the process of self-selection. The people who worked in the orphanages for any length of time lasted precisely because they could tolerate it. No one was there to advocate for the children; everyone worked in service of the system, which demanded only that these unwanted children be kept out of sight and out of mind, and at very little cost. Meanwhile, Ceausescu was busy perpetrating countless other violations of the rights and dignity of the entire nation, sowing terror, demanding absolute fealty, and creating a society where the social contract had entirely broken down. It was every man for himself. Theft and black-marketeering were a way of life in every workplace, and no one hesitated to put their own needs and those of their family ahead of others. And if there were some really horrific bad actors who would commit even worse abuses in the orphanages, we had no doubt that blind eyes would often, if not always, be turned, because no one wanted to rock the boat, attract attention, or cause trouble that could cost them their jobs and even their personal safety.

If you think none of that could happen in America because of some higher moral standard, you’re kidding yourself. Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric has given the stamp of approval to those who value blind obedience and fatuous patriotism over fairness and the rights of individuals. Already, Americans relegate the poor and the mentally ill to prisons and to the streets. We allow health care and education costs to bankrupt families. We shrink our social safety net, leaving kids without food security. Is that so far from warehousing children in inhumane conditions? As detention centers for immigrant children multiply, and as Americans become ever more distracted by our financial troubles, addictions, culture wars, and manufactured fear of the Others who are supposedly stealing our jobs and threatening our security, the separation of immigrant families will become background noise, and the children will be treated in whatever manner the Trump administration sees fit. Not only could it happen; it could happen quickly. This is no time for complacency.

UPDATE: Just hours after publishing this piece, I read this: "The former head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told NBC News that migrant parents separated from their children at the border are sometimes unable to relocate their child and remain permanently separated." And so it begins...