Orphans
This Country Needs a More Adequate Mirror
When Mr. Cancer came calling a couple of years ago, it lit a fire under my intent to write about how an American Indian dropout becomes a professor. I set out in what I perceived to be a race with my own mortality to get it done, only to smack into the most difficult writing task I ever encountered in a lifetime of writing. I won the race, only to run into the most difficult publishing task I ever encountered after managing to survive two jobs under the dictum “publish or perish.”
What the hell — the story’s done and publishing it will be my family’s problem if I don’t get it done. They could help with that while nobody but me could write it.
The writing was hard because the story was painful and I had stuffed much of the pain down the memory hole. The simple fact of growing up without a father or a mother became less simple and my gratitude to my maternal grandparents grew larger, as did the guilt over my failure to express it adequately when I had the chance.
The word “orphan” had a different ring, though I was not orphaned in the biological sense. It’s that ring demanding that I raise my voice against my government’s policy of creating orphans on our southern border for the stated purpose of scaring away other families also fleeing from the drug cartel turf wars. If the U.S. is not scary enough, they will…
