This is the most iconic photo of a crying baby in the 20th Century — the Chinese baby separated from his likely dead parents after Imperial Japan’s 1937 bombing of civilians at the Shanghai South Railway Station.
A 2-year-old Honduran child cries as her mother is detained near the U.S.-Mexico border.
This child is crying for her parents taken away not by fascist bombs but by Homeland Security border patrol officers.
Both are photos of child abuse — in the 20th century and now the 21st. My father and uncles fought the Axis fascist powers to prevent abuse of children like the baby in Shanghai. What would they think of America caging children like the Nazis? Is this the America of 2018? What happened to the vows of remembering “the date that will live in infamy” and “never again”? What of former First Lady Laura Bush’s “broken heart” and her reminding us of the shame of the internment of Japanese-Americans, including children, in camps during the Second World War?
Is America now no better than the Imperial Japanese military who bombed Shanghai and then Pearl Harbor? My son in Oklahoma has a girl friend who is part Native American. I told Jana that she alone has a right to go to the border and say don’t come in. The rest of us are immigrants or children and grandchildren of immigrants — like Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway and Sean Hannity — a Johnny-come-lately Irish immigrant family who arrived way too late to fight for America in the Civil War (for the Union), World War I and World War II like my Irish ancestors did. Is America now no better than Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany in abusing babies?
Halpin's Asia Takeout 