From the foldings of its robe, [the Spirit] brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable....boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, a stale and shriveled hand... had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity has monsters half so horrible and dread. – Scrooge, with the Ghost of Christmas Present in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”

It’s hard to know where, in the media blizzard of conflicting reports, outrage, defenses, and fourth-grade-level recrimination, to begin. What’s true anymore? What’s really happening at our southern border with immigrants attempting to enter the United States surreptitiously, as opposed to those seeking asylum? What’s happening to families of either type, or to unaccompanied young people?

Are private companies actually charging (and getting) $700 a night for each incarcerated immigrant? Have some children been “lost” in a disorganized distribution of detainees? Are some happily dwelling with new foster families? Where will we find the attorneys, translators, and physicians to handle the crowd “suddenly” appearing at our border and points of entry? Everyone – as I deduce by watching television – has one or two answers, but no one seems to have a comprehensive grasp of the situation.

(Meanwhile, almost as if Congress had been waiting for a brouhaha and racket like this to distract us, our peerless representatives have apparently – and stealthily; the old magician’s trick – introduced a bill that balances the budget by cutting aid to the citizens who need it most. Can this be true?)

As always and everywhere, families and children bear the brunt of the confusion and fighting among the leaders of the people, who it had been assumed are reasonable, evidence-driven adults. It’s always the children – in pain, weeping, driven to distraction, homeless, disoriented, sick – who are oppressed most by the idiotic pushing and shouting matches of the authorities.

Those who use children as pawns are oblivious to, or at least choose to ignore at their peril, a fact that any gardener or puppy trainer or child psychologist could recite: How you treat and train your infants determines what they will be when they grow up.

What’s a nation’s greatest resource? Is it tin mines, coal, oil, or scenery? Nope, it’s its children. And along with its children, their support systems: child care, education, free access to affordable health care, and safety. Those who would deny children any of these, or scrimp on their support, are ignoring the very important fact that these kids, those who survive, will very soon be grown up, and the extent to which their needs have been rationed or denied will determine their behavior as adults – adults who, by the way, will be making decisions about the fate of those old folks who once held the kids’ fates so carelessly.

The United States is withdrawing from the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations because, as Ambassador Nicki Haley claims, it’s absurd for the United Nations to claim there is dire poverty in the United States. She’s either been co-opted, or doesn’t travel much outside rarefied circles. Likewise, some state boards of education are constantly attempting to rewrite American history and science curricula to reflect “religious values” and mythical stories of biological development. Is it any wonder the Internet is so consumed with angry, ill-informed rhetoric, that bumper stickers have grown so simplistic and profane, that noise levels at falsehood-filled pep rallies approach a jet-engine’s 100 decibels?

The kids we’re mistreating today will be adults tomorrow. Some will remember a detention facility with the face of the President painted grotesquely on the wall, as in a scene from 1984. Others will remember sobbing inconsolably, looked over by burly, uniformed men and women forbidden to touch them to comfort them. Many will become doctors, teachers, lawyers, politicians, perhaps criminals or psychological wrecks. Their careers will be informed by the chaos in which they entered this Promised Land. And their lives will in some way be stunted by their experiences. The children, as the old saying goes, will become the father to the adults. Can we expect them to be kinder to us than we’ve been to them? For, to paraphrase Hosea, We have sown the wind, and shall reap the whirlwind.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”