LETTER: We Cannot Say ‘We Didn’t Know’

OPINION

Editor;

I write this letter to my fellow Texans who justify the evils of the State:

Today I read about a woman in Minnesota who puts an AirTag in her bra when she leaves her house — so that if she is kidnapped by the government, her family might know where she’s been taken.

I’ve read about a woman donating breast milk to feed babies whose mothers have been taken by ICE. I’ve seen our own jail rosters and counted the increasing number of ICE holds.

I don’t know how to make you care about other people.

I don’t know how to break through your immediate justification of a regime that is kidnapping people from their homes without cause, leaving abandoned cars on the side of the road, killing people in the streets and bragging in chats about bullet holes.

I don’t know how to make you see something other than anti-immigrant slop from your propaganda entertainment sources as you scroll your social media accounts; those platforms and their algorithms are designed to drive us all farther apart.

Now, more than ever, I urge you to consider the two greatest commandments of Christ: to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength; and to love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:30-31). These commandments demand justice and accountability from an inhumane government.

This week there are tuberculosis cases, COVID cases, and measles cases at ICE detention facilities in El Paso and in Dilley.

There are children – hundreds of children – at these facilities being exposed to these terrible pathogens; not counting the awful conditions of these concentration camps.

Anne Frank (and thousands of others) died from typhus, a communicable disease, in a concentration camp. Yet too many people remain willfully ignorant, and continue to justify WHY people are deserving of mistreatment by the hands of the federal government. Your silence makes you culpable.

Growing up during a time in which World War II veterans were still living, I often heard people ask how the German populace KNEW about the death camps and did nothing.

The events of WWII were not so far removed that the horrors had escaped public memory (or history books). These Germans were often described as “monsters” or “demons” – but they were not.

Instead, they were bakers, teachers, electricians, plumbers…just like we are. They were not monsters, they were humans, who also justified horrors and their silence made them guilty, too.

We cannot say “we did not know” when considering the horrors of today; when we can read hundreds of news sources from all around the world, we can see with our own eyes the atrocities committed by our federal government and its representatives, and we do nothing.

My children and grandchildren will not have to ask what I’ve done to make my voice heard and stop the actions of my government.

I can stand before them with a clear conscience knowing that I did try to love my neighbor as I love myself – I did advocate for the prisoner, for the hungry, for the naked, and for the immigrant. What will you say?

— Heather Wylie, San Angelo