Hopefully on the way to being published.
I don’t usually do political stuff, but I need to be an activist for children as a former teacher and current parent. My novel is about four boys running away from the foster care system that has misused and de-valued them. They are caught in a small Iowa farm town by a terrible blizzard, and it becomes the goal of some of the townspeople to make a place for them in the midst of a deadly snowstorm. It has some relevance to what’s happening on our southern border.
Children are flocking to this country to escape terrible things and cruel lives of suffering of one sort or another. Angry Americans are trying to turn them away and shut the door in their faces. It strikes me that someone is not paying attention to a fundamental fact about children. Children are valuable. They are an investment that pays off in the future in ways that you cannot estimate the monetary value of. They are future people of consequence, potentially able to provide service and gain to the people who willingly take them in. Many of them have relatives in this country already. Many of them have plans and places to go already. But even the ones who are going to cost us time, effort, and money are valuable beyond measure. We should be taking them in and opening our hearts and our wallets for them. Didn’t Jesus say, “What you do for the least of these, you do also for me?” Even if he didn’t say that, that is how we should feel.
I ended my career teaching English to kids who came to Texas from other countries and didn’t speak English well enough to get by without special help. I met and worked with wonderful young people from Eritrea, Pakistan, Lebanon, Viet Nam, China, El Salvador, and Mexico. Many of them came to this country with limited resources and no money. Many of them have had to work very hard for the things we all take for granted. And here’s the kicker… they are all just like my own great great grandfather who came from Germany and learned English in Pennsylvania where people looked down on him for taking American jobs even though he worked at things most Americans didn’t want to do. These kids are just like us. We are not far removed from them in the ways we pretend. We should not be building fences and fighting to keep them out. Let’s rather spend the money on celebrating their escape from their troubles and their choice to come help us build a better life in this so-called land of opportunity.
Catch a Falling Star 