Children deserve compassion, not cruelty

The most telling news story in the past few days was that of Penka, the cow. Penka softened human hearts while illegally crossing a national boundary. It was no small feat, given the prejudices abroad these days. She was grazing away with her herd near a small Bulgarian village when it wandered across the border into Serbia.

Bulgaria is in the European Union. Serbia is not. So when the cow was found and sent back to Bulgaria, officialdom decreed that she should be euthanized because she didn’t have paperwork required by the EU.

Animal rights activists raised the bovine equivalent of holy Hades. Among the Penka supporters was former Beatle Paul McCartney. We’ll get back to him later.

This resulted in a stiff, unsmiling Bulgarian bureaucrat in a black suit going before a TV camera to declare that Penka was being spared and welcomed back to her home country. Said bureaucrat could contain justify that.”

Other religious leaders are in accord. Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned the practice of family separation, pointing out that it is unnecessary to serve the legitimate purpose of protecting our borders. “Separating babies from their mothers is not the answer, and is immoral,” the bishops declared. himself no longer. He burst into laughter.

The lovers of life, human and animal, won a big victory. It is such people who keep the earth churning, despite the best efforts of politicians, so-called world leaders and small-minded partisans in all endeavors of society to put their vapid rules and prejudices ahead of common sense.

Which brings us to our national government rousting the children of people daring to cross the borders of America and locking those children, even the youngest, away in penitentiary-like internment centers. There have Twenty-six Jewish organizations did the same, calling the practice “unconscionable.”

The Orchard Cove group organized by Sherman, Mulliken and others is discussing ways in which the voices of those in their 80s and 90s can be amplified in defense of children at the border. There is some support for taking advantage of the Yiddish word been 2,000 such atrocities thus far, and more are coming.

Let us paraphrase Act 3, Scene 1, from Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice”:

“Hath not a child hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ... If you prick children do they not bleed? If you tickle them, do they not laugh?”

Are children separated from their parents by men with guns not terrified, not traumatized, not lonely, not helpless, not hopeless, not desperate for a mother’s loving touch or a father’s strong arms of protection?

Do they not, here in the land of the free and the home of the most brazenly heartless politicians, deserve the same compassion, freedom and justice as a Bulgarian cow?

Are not the world’s children just as sacred as said cow?

So far, American officialdom has paid no heed to the few of us who are protesting, except to roar back with a meaningless Bible verse, the same one used by the Nazis to justify their millions of murders.

Clearly, our protests have been too few and too weak to penetrate the iron curtain of officiousness that keeps the children imprisoned, an act that is sure to break hearts and warp the minds of both parents and children for a lifetime.

When the Beatles were breaking up, Paul McCartney had a dream that he was being comforted by his mother (Mother Mary), saying it would be all OK.

So he wrote the song “Let It Be”:

“And when the brokenhearted people/ Living in the world agree/ There will be an answer, let it be”

Let it be.