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...

I'm seeing a lot of excitement and enthusiasm about what's going on in Iran -- in many ways, with good reason. And also, there's a lot of excitement about the use of the Internet to disseminate information -- also, with good reason. But I'm also disturbed that I'm not hearing enough cautionary voices -- the voice of experience that says, "Just because you have protesters in the streets facing down powerful government forces does not mean there's a simple right/wrong, good/evil dichotomy going on. And just because you saw it on Twitter doesn't mean it's true."

My familiarity with Iranian politics is minimal, so on that side, I'll link to and quote a NY Times piece. But I'd also like to share some things I learned from having been eyewitness to a similar situation.

First, from the NY Times: An Insider Turned Agitator Is the Face of Iran's Opposition.

His followers have begun calling him “the Gandhi of Iran.” His image is carried aloft in the vast opposition demonstrations that have shaken Iran in recent days, his name chanted in rhyming verses that invoke Islam’s most sacred martyrs.

Mir Hussein Moussavi has become the public face of the movement, the man the protesters consider the true winner of the disputed presidential election.

 

But he is in some ways an accidental leader, a moderate figure anointed at the last minute to represent a popular upwelling against the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He is far from being a liberal in the Western sense, and it is not yet clear how far he will be willing to go in defending the broad democratic hopes he has come to embody.

 

Mr. Moussavi, 67, is an insider who has moved toward opposition, and his motives for doing so remain murky. He was close to the founder of Iran’s Islamic Revolution but is at odds with the current supreme leader. Some prominent figures have rallied to his cause, including a former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. So it is not clear how much this battle reflects a popular resistance to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s hard-line policies, and how much is about a struggle for power.

 

The rest of the article is well worth reading. I think we in the West need to be aware that our politicians and media tend to portray in a positive light protests and revolutions against governments we don't like, manipulating public opinion to suit our own agenda. So, for example, when it's anti-communist protesters, it's portrayed as a home-grown democratic movement, and its leader is glorified. Remember Boris Yeltsin? He didn't exactly turn out to be all he was cracked up to be. Yes, in Iran it's about a stolen election. But when Mugabe stole the Zimbabwe election, Western interests were unaffected and coverage was minimal.

But the thing that has me most concerned now is the way the informal, grassroots dissemination of information via social networking sites and other internet-based services is being uncritically lauded. Yes, it's good that the images are getting out, but I'm convinced that Americans (and possibly Europeans, I don't know) have little idea how quickly rumors and misinformation spread in that kind of environment, and how very dangerous that can be.

In 1991, I was in Bucharest, Romania when a horde of coal miners from the the Jiu Valley descended on Bucharest and rioted in the streets for nearly a week. (This was about a year and a half after the Communist Ceausescu regime fell.) I covered the story for the NY Times. The whole situation was extremely confusing. Why were the miners here? Whose bidding were they doing? The previous year, they had come to Bucharest at the call of the government of President Ion Iliescu to put down student protests, and the miners beat students brutally in the streets. This time, they were protesting against the government, presumably because promises made after the last time had gone unfulfilled.

So there I was, trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. I could report what I saw -- the tear gas, the bullets, the fires, the tanks, the angry miners -- but I was trying to understand the who and the why as well. I asked everyone -- the miners, the Romanian reporters, government officials, friends, random people in the street. And let me tell you, what an education THAT was.

In a country where everyone assumes that the government and the media do nothing but lie, and where paranoia is ratcheted up to an excruciatingly high level, people become accustomed to holding opinions and beliefs with absolutely no evidence or hard information to base them on -- because evidence and hard information are impossible to come by. Age-old prejudices are as good as facts, and disseminating lies that you KNOW are lies in order to further your own agenda is 100 percent okay, whether you're an electrician or a journalist.

So, when I asked people why the miners were rioting, I was told with absolute certainty by people from all walks of life (including Romanian journalists and officials) that the miners were either being controlled by the international conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons, or that they were protesting AGAINST the international conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons. Clearly, Jews and Freemasons were involved, because the Prime Minster of Romania, Petre Roman, was one-quarter Jewish and a Freemason. Depending on who you asked, the miners were either still doing the government's bidding as they had done the previous year (in which case they're working for the Jews and Freemasons), or they had turned against their former masters. 

I was also constantly hearing complete misinformation about what was actually going on in the street. At various times, people told me with certainty that the parliament building had burned down (there had been a small fire); that dozens of people had been shot dead (two people had); that Petre Roman had fled the country (he hadn't, though he did eventually give in to pressure and step down); etc. I can only imagine how the echo chamber of the internet would have magnified that kind of misinformation.

At other times during my stay in Romania, I heard all kinds of crazy notions communicated as facts by people who you would think would have some idea about what constitutes reliable evidence. My favorite lie that I heard over and over again, including from physicians and orphanage directors, was that Romanian children were being adopted by Americans in order to harvest their organs (the proof: many adopted children were gypsies, and why else would anyone want them?).

This article, written by an American journalist who was a Fulbright Scholar in Romania at the same time I was there, rings true -- I can totally relate to being an American utterly befuddled by the Romanian mindset:

But behind the scenes—above politics and any notions of civil society—floats the fine hand of fate....Romania remains a deeply superstitious country, a place where intrigue and conspiracy are accepted as fact by everyone from unlettered peasants to elected officials.

My point is that I don't think most people in the West fully appreciate how incredibly fucked up things become in a society where people are unaccustomed to access to reliable information. We think Americans will believe anything, and that the American news media is a total joke. Yeah, American news media is on the decline, and it needs a lot of improvement, but it is still of enormous value, and our efforts should not be to replace professional journalism with any ol' blogger who wants to have his say. There's a role for that blogger, but it's NOT as a primary information source.

The media is guilty of presenting a skewed view of the world, but there are still lots of reporters on the ground working to verify information and to avoid reporting rumor as fact, and we need more of that, not less. Likewise, we need editors who hold their reporters' feet to the fire in terms of getting the story and getting it right. As consumers, we should demand more of that, not abandon traditional journalism altogether in favor of grainy videos from personal cell phones.

Going back to Iran -- I admire the people who want to choose their government and who are standing up for their rights. But just because I admire them doesn't mean I'm going to believe everything they say or assume their leader is the salvation of the Middle East. And I sure as hell am not going to rely on Twitter for my news.