I was heartened by the outpouring of love and respect for the basic dignity and humanity of immigrants coming to America at the Bristol Independence Day parade, with dozens of local residents marching against our government’s cruel policies of separating refugee families and holding children in horrific conditions, under the watch of brutal guards, with many well-documented cases of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse.
As a first-generation American who has been fortunate enough to live the “American Dream”, and as a grandson of Holocaust survivors, I am deeply pained to see such racist cruelty being inflicted by my government, in my name.
Let’s not be distracted by the false outrage being spun by the Trump Administration and its supporters over whether or not it’s offensive to call these children’s prisons “concentration camps” (hint: it is not, these very much are concentration camps). What is truly offensive is that we are jailing refugee children at all, and that we are blocking refugees from safe haven on our shores, simply because they have brown skin.
This is not the America that welcomed me as an immigrant child in 1983. What has become of our collective soul?
Dave Silberman
Middlebury