A Perfect Life in This Perfect World

# 2. The child is not guilty. The child is innocent.

Waking up from a night’s sleep is always different. But also in some ways similar, each morning.

I know a new day is coming. New opportunities, new pleasures, or things to worry about.

I get up and walk to the kitchen. I look outside, I can see a blue sky with some clouds. I think it’s going to be another perfect day.

Do we really know and do we appreciate living in a country where life is safe? A society where we can wake up every morning and know that the world outside the inner circles around us is normal, safe.

But normal — not normal. What is normal?

I open my laptop and start reading an e-mail from HuffPost:

SEPARATED CHILDREN BEING HELD IN ‘TENDER AGE SHELTERS’ The Associated Press reported Tuesday night that infants and toddlers separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border as a result of the White House “zero tolerance” immigration policy are being held at “tender age shelters.” The AP reports that the shelters are filled with distraught children who are “hysterical, crying and acting out.”

In the world today nothing seems normal. Many places there is like a state of emergency. In the USA Donald Trump’s government has set up camps (=prisons!) “filled with distraught children who are hysterical, crying and acting out.” Children being taken from their parents. Children who are totally innocent, who are not to blame for events that happen in the world, or for what their parents or relatives have done.

They are only children! Children who were just born into the world and who suddenly find themselves kidnapped, imprisoned — brief in a disastrous situation. The children are placed in camps in different places in the USA.

• The children do not know where their parents are.
• The parents do not know where their children are.

Nothing is normal.

These children are being traumatized. They will most probably have post-traumatic stress effects. What will their life be like?

I think of myself when I grew up. I was born and grew up in a small industrial town in Norway. The second world war had just ended. The world had just begun building up again what that war had destroyed. I have understood that it was a period of optimism. During my youth, I felt optimistic myself, despite the atomic war threat that came as a dark shadow and an ice-cold wind with they called the “Cold War”.

My father was a worker at one of the three big factories in the town. Together with him my mother was the fixed point in my existence. She took care of my younger brother and me, and of everything else in the family, as it was usual for a housewife in that period.

I could play with other children, I could be with my family, I could learn what I needed to learn. I went to school. I could look to the future with confidence. When I was 18, I left the town and moved to a larger city to start my studies at the university.

Of course, not everything was okay when I was a child. I met resistance, I had to learn some things the hard way. But it was a safe world — relatively speaking.

• I knew where I came from, who I was, and who I wanted to become.
• I had thoughts about the future.
• I had confidence in the future.

What about these children in the US internment camps?

They are not guilty of what their relatives are being accused of. They should not be punished for what others have done. They are not to be punished. But Donald Trump is doing exactly that. Punishing them for being brought by their parents across the US border in the quest for a better life, flying from an imperfect existence in an imperfect world.

These children are subject to huge injustice. What about the trauma that these kids get? Who will help them? How will they be able to live a good, normal life?

We live in a world that could be perfect. Or at least we live in a world where it is possible to imagine that the world could be perfect. If only humans did their best. Did the necessary to approach that goal.

I wish I could say that I am confident.

That I believe in the future.

I wish I could have confidence in this idea:

A perfect future for all children in this perfect world

There is enough to engage with for every human who is able to see what is going on. It is not just about the kidnapped children in the US internment camps.

It is about who governs the world, and how we — the citizens of the world — elect the people we want to govern us. We need to restore our belief in our future. The future belongs to the children.

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