Friends,
Celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Henry David
Thoreau [July 12, 1817] by joining the NATIONAL CAMPAIGN FOR NONVIOLENT
RESISTANCE in the RIVERS OF BLOOD II on Wed., July 12. This will be
an action of nonviolent civil resistance to call on Congress to stop funding
wars which are causing rivers of blood to flow through the US Capitol. Meet
in Union Station in Washington, D.C. in the lower level food court near
Walgreens at 10 AM on July 12 for a final planning meeting. First, the
group will deliver a petition to offices of Congressional leaders calling on
them to end the funding for war. Then a number of activists from the group
will gather on the steps of the Capitol to read Martin Luther King’s Riverside
Church speech. We invite all people of nonviolence to join
us. Please wear a t-shirt with red paint to simulate blood. Bring
posters.
Let me know if you would like to sign the Petition,
which will be delivered to Representatives Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi, and
Senators Mitch McConnell and Charles Schumer. Contact Max at 410-323-1607 or
mobuszewski2001 at Comcast dot net.
Kagiso, Max
Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Where Have
All the Children Gone? The Age of Grief
Karen J. Greenberg
Thursday, June 15, 2017
TomDispatch
It was one
of those remarks that should wake you up to the fact that the regions the
United States has, since September 2001, played such a role in destabilizing
are indeed in crisis, and that this process isn’t just taking place at the
level of failing states and bombed-out cities, but in the most personal way
imaginable. It’s devastating for countless individuals -- mothers, fathers,
wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, friends, lovers -- and above all for
children.
Ward’s
words caught a reality that grows harsher by the week, and not just in Syria,
but in parts of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, among other
places in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Death and destruction stalk whole
populations in Syria and other crumbling countries and failed or failing states
across the region. In one of those statistics that should stagger the
imagination, devastated Syria alone accounts for more than five million [1] of
the estimated 21 million refugees worldwide. And sadly, these numbers do not
reflect an even harsher reality: you only become a “refugee” by crossing a
border. According to [2] the
U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR), in 2015 there were another 44 million people
uprooted from their homes who were, in essence, exiles in their own
lands. Add those numbers together and you have one out of every 113
people on the planet -- and those figures, the worst since World War II, may
only be growing.
Rawya
Rageh, a senior crisis adviser at Amnesty International, added [3] troubling
details to Ward’s storyline, among them that deteriorating conditions in
war-torn Syria have made it nearly “impossible to find bread, baby formula, or
diapers... leaving survivors at a loss for words” (and just about everything
else). Meanwhile, across a vast region, families who survive as families
continue to face the daily threat of death, hunger, and loss. They often
are forced to live in makeshift refugee camps in what amounts to a perpetual
state of grief and fear, while the threat of rape [4], death
by drone [5] or
suicide bomber, or by other forms of warfare and terror is for many just a
normal part of existence, and parental despair is the definition of everyday
life.
Resignation
Syndrome
When normal
life disintegrates in this way, the most devastating impact falls on the
children. The death toll [6] among
children in Syria alone reached at least 700 in 2016. For those who survive
there and elsewhere, the prospect of homelessness and statelessness looms
large. Approximately half of the refugee population consists of young people under
the age of 18. For them and for the internally displaced, food is often
scarce, especially in a country like Yemen [7], in the
midst of a Saudi-led, American-backed war in which civilians are commonly [8] the
targets of airstrikes, cholera is spreading [9], and a
widespread famine is reportedly imminent [10]. In
a Yemeni scenario in which 17 million people now are facing "severe food
insecurity," nearly two million children are already acutely malnourished.
That number, like so many others emerging from the disaster that is the
twenty-first-century Middle East, is overwhelming, but we shouldn’t let it numb
us to the simple fact that each and every one of those two million young people
is a child like any other child, except that he or she is being deprived of the
chance to grow up undamaged.
And for
those who do escape, who actually make it to safer countries beyond the
immediate war zone, life still remains fragile at best with little expectation
of a sustainable future. More than half of the six million school-age
children who are refugees, reports [11] the
UNHCR, have no schools to attend. Primary schools are scarce for them and
only 1% of refugee youth attend college (compared to a global average of
34%). Startling numbers of such refugees are engaged [12] in child labor under
terrible working conditions. Worse yet, a significant number of child
refugees are traveling alone. According to [13] the
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), “at least 300,000 unaccompanied and
separated children were recorded in some 80 countries in 2015-2016... easy prey
for traffickers and others who abuse and exploit them.”
Such children,
mired in poverty and dislocation, are aptly described as growing up in a
culture of deprivation and grief. At least since the creation of UNICEF
in 1946, an agency initially focused on the needs of the young in the
devastated areas of post-World War II Europe, children at risk have posed a
challenge to the world. In recent years, however, the traumas experienced by
such young people have been rising to levels not seen since that long-gone era.
A heartbreaking story [14] by
Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker catches the extremity of both
the plight faced by child refugees and possible reactions to it. She
reports on a group of them in Sweden, largely from “former Soviet and Yugoslav
states,” whose families had been denied asylum and were facing deportation.
A number of them suffered from a modern version of a syndrome once known
as “voodoo death,” in which a child falls into a coma-like trance of severe
apathy. Doctors have termed this state “resignation syndrome, an illness that
is said to exist only in Sweden, and only among refugees.” Fearing ouster and
threatened with being deprived of the ties they had already formed in that
country, they simply turned off, physically as well as emotionally.
While this
is certainly not the first time grief has engulfed parts of the world, children
have felt the brunt of its woes. By its nature, warfare breeds destruction,
dislocation, and grief. But America's never-ending war on terror, its “longest
war,” has contributed to the instances of trauma suffered globally
among children and continues to undermine their chances for recovery.
As
psychologists and psychiatrists who specialize in grief have found, it takes
time as well as help to absorb and deal with such trauma and the grief for
lives lost and worlds destroyed that follows in its wake. Psychiatrist
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who famously identified the five steps [15] involved
in reacting to grief, has underscored the time it takes to recover from such
traumatic experiences. Unfortunately, for refugee children and those uprooted
in their own lands, there is usually no time for such a recovery, no safe space
in which to experience those five steps. Instead, year after year, the trauma,
like the wars, simply persists and intensifies.
One thing
seems guaranteed: children who suffer long-term trauma are likely to develop
physiological and psychological symptoms that persist into adulthood, rendering
it hard for them to parent in a healthy and supportive way. And in this
fashion, the wounds of the wars of the present will be handed on to the
future. In the technical language of the experts [16], “Adverse
childhood experiences increase the chance of social risk factors, mental health
issues, substance abuse, intimate partner violence, and adult adoption of risky
adult behaviors. All of these can affect parenting in a negative way,” and so
perpetuate a cycle of dysfunction and trouble.
The Living
Casualties of This New Age
There are
many ways to think about this twinning of trauma and childhood, which is
becoming such a signal part of our age. After the era of the concentration
camps in Nazi Europe, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, who had himself spent
almost a year in one, studied the effects of trauma [17] on
those who survived exposure to extreme deprivation and the constant threat of
death. Adults, he concluded, face the possibility of schizophrenia and
the destruction of their personality structures, but children, he wrote, faced
worse: the destruction of the self before the ego even came into being. Having
been exposed to “extreme situations,” they ended up feeling overwhelmed,
powerless, and “deprived of hope.” Many of them had also been forced to grow up
without parents who might have helped them through the trauma. Worse yet, some
of those he studied had actually seen their parents -- or siblings -- killed.
What he
learned remains, unfortunately, applicable to children in our moment.
Isn’t it time to begin paying more attention to the cost of losing so many
children to the forces of deprivation, soul-crushing devastation, and the
culture of death at both a global and the most personal of levels? Isn’t
it time for the rest of us to begin to imagine just what millions of damaged
children will mean both for our world and for the world they will inherit as
adults? Some of them, of course, will rise above the damage done to them in
their youth, but many will not and so will lead lives of loneliness, confusion,
and pain, and will potentially pose a danger both to themselves and to others.
As
Bettelheim’s work, which almost anticipated Sweden’s “resignation syndrome,”
suggests, the early years of the twenty-first century are hardly the first age
of grief, nor will they likely be the last. They are, however, ours to
deal with and their ravages are already evident not just in the Middle East,
but in the rest of the world, too. In Europe and the United States, terrorist
attacks tied ideologically to the war on (and of) terror and targeted against
civilians, continue to undermine the sense of security to which the citizens of
such countries were until recently accustomed. Children are not only part of
this cycle of death and destruction, but in a recent instance -- the suicide
bombing in Manchester, England -- were its target, as they also have been
elsewhere, as in the abduction [18] of
hundreds of young girls by Boko Haram in Chibok, Nigeria, in 2014. Meanwhile,
teenage boys are being targeted as recruits for ISIS in Syria, Iraq, and
elsewhere.
Strikingly,
the United States has shown remarkably little concern for the children of the war-torn
and violence-ridden areas of the Greater Middle East. Those young people could
be thought of as the worst of the collateral damage from the years of
invasions, occupations, raids, bombing runs, and drone strikes, including the
children or youthful relatives of targeted, designated American enemies
like Anwar al-Awlaki [19].
This lack
of concern is strikingly reflected in the anti-refugee policies of the Trump
era. Refugee children refused admission to the U.S. and other advanced
countries and, forced to live in a state of limbo, are being harmed. Such
policies and “bans” are exactly the opposite of what’s needed to heal the world
and move forward. Recently, as if to make just that point, an old photograph [20] of a
child has been appearing on Twitter over the caption “Denied refuge and
murdered in Auschwitz: the human cost of refugee bans.” As a signal of what to
expect from the U.S. in the age of Trump, consider his administration’s
proposed budget, which calls for a cut of more than $130 million [21] in
funding for UNICEF, the signature agency providing relief and services to
children in need globally.
The U.S.
and its allies may one day defeat ISIS and other terror groups, but if what’s
left in their wake is only bombed-out, unreconstructed landscapes and millions
of uprooted children, what kind of victory will that be? What kind of future
will that ensure?
There will
be no “winning,” not truly, if the crisis of grief, the crisis of the children
who are the living casualties of this new age, is not addressed sooner rather
than later. For every dollar that goes toward a weapon or the immediate
struggle against terror outfits, shouldn’t another go to the support of those
children, to the struggle to stabilize their lives, to provide them with homes,
education, and care of the sort that they so desperately need? For every
short-term prediction about the possible harm refugees could bring to a
country, shouldn’t there be some consideration of what the children who are
taken care of will want to give their new homelands in return? Shouldn’t
some thought be given to the world that the rejected or deported young, if left
in distress, will someday create?
In Sweden,
where the problems of traumatized refugee children have now been studied for
more than a decade, the recommendation of psychiatrists and other experts to
that country’s policymakers was simple enough: “A permanent residency permit is
considered by far the most effective ‘treatment.’”
The loss of
childhood, the crippling effects of trauma, the narrative of grief, and the
cruel removal of any sense of hope or of a secure future have been seeping into
global discourse about children for many years now. Isn’t it time to begin to
see their global crisis for what it is: one of the major threats to a stable
future for the planet?
Karen J.
Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular [22], is the
director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. Her latest
book is Rogue Justice: The Making of the
Security State [23], out in paperback this
May. She is also author of The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s
First 100 Days [24]. Rose Sheela and CNS
interns Anastasia Bez, Rohini Kurup, and Andrew Reisman contributed research
for this article.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter [25] and
join us on Facebook [26]. Check out
the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and
Terror Since World War II [27], as well
as John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands [28], Nick
Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the
Dead [29], and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance,
Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World [30].
Copyright
2017 Karen J. Greenberg Reprinted with permission.
Links:
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/30/syrian-refugee-number-passes-5m-mark-un-reveals
[2] http://www.unhcr.org/afr/news/latest/2016/6/5763b65a4/global-forced-displacement-hits-record-high.html
[3] https://youtu.be/WY7GtMdqhYk
[4] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/01/female-refugees-face-physical-assault-exploitation-and-sexual-harassment-on-their-journey-through-europe/
[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/22/world/asia/drone-strike-reported-outside-pakistans-tribal-region.html
[6] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-39252307
[7] http://www.aljazeera.com/video/news/2017/04/raises-famine-alarm-yemen-170425075042281.html
[8] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/16/third-of-saudi-airstrikes-on-yemen-have-hit-civilian-sites-data-shows
[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/world/middleeast/unicef-yemen-cholera-saudi-war.html
[10] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/mar/16/yemen-conflict-7-million-close-to-famine
[11] http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/press/2016/9/57d7d6f34/unhcr-reports-crisis-refugee-education.html
[12] http://unhcr.org/FutureOfSyria/children-at-work.html
[13] https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/childrenonthemove/uprooted/?utm_source=media&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=uprooted
[14] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/the-trauma-of-facing-deportation
[15] https://www.amazon.com/Grief-Grieving-Finding-Meaning-Through/dp/1476775559/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1497011697&sr=8-2&keywords=kubler+ross+on+death+and+dying
[16] https://www.aap.org/en-us/Documents/ttb_aces_consequences.pdf
[17] https://www.amazon.com/SURVIVING-OTHER-ESSAYS-Bruno-Bettelheim/dp/039450402X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497011210&sr=8-1&keywords=bettelheim+surviving
[18] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-32299943
[19] https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-old-american-in-yemen-trump-just-killed-his-8-year-old-sister/
[20] https://twitter.com/amnestyOz/status/835052654392901633
[21] https://www.unicefusa.org/help/advocate/maintain-us-government-contribution-unicef
[22] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176249/tomgram%3A_karen_greenberg%2C_the_forever_prisoners_of_guantanamo/
[23] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0804138214/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[24] https://www.amazon.com/dp/019975411X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[25] https://twitter.com/TomDispatch
[26] http://www.facebook.com/tomdispatch
[27] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467236/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[28] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467244/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[29] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[30] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[2] http://www.unhcr.org/afr/news/latest/2016/6/5763b65a4/global-forced-displacement-hits-record-high.html
[3] https://youtu.be/WY7GtMdqhYk
[4] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/01/female-refugees-face-physical-assault-exploitation-and-sexual-harassment-on-their-journey-through-europe/
[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/22/world/asia/drone-strike-reported-outside-pakistans-tribal-region.html
[6] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-39252307
[7] http://www.aljazeera.com/video/news/2017/04/raises-famine-alarm-yemen-170425075042281.html
[8] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/16/third-of-saudi-airstrikes-on-yemen-have-hit-civilian-sites-data-shows
[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/world/middleeast/unicef-yemen-cholera-saudi-war.html
[10] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/mar/16/yemen-conflict-7-million-close-to-famine
[11] http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/press/2016/9/57d7d6f34/unhcr-reports-crisis-refugee-education.html
[12] http://unhcr.org/FutureOfSyria/children-at-work.html
[13] https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/childrenonthemove/uprooted/?utm_source=media&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=uprooted
[14] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/the-trauma-of-facing-deportation
[15] https://www.amazon.com/Grief-Grieving-Finding-Meaning-Through/dp/1476775559/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1497011697&sr=8-2&keywords=kubler+ross+on+death+and+dying
[16] https://www.aap.org/en-us/Documents/ttb_aces_consequences.pdf
[17] https://www.amazon.com/SURVIVING-OTHER-ESSAYS-Bruno-Bettelheim/dp/039450402X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497011210&sr=8-1&keywords=bettelheim+surviving
[18] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-32299943
[19] https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-old-american-in-yemen-trump-just-killed-his-8-year-old-sister/
[20] https://twitter.com/amnestyOz/status/835052654392901633
[21] https://www.unicefusa.org/help/advocate/maintain-us-government-contribution-unicef
[22] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176249/tomgram%3A_karen_greenberg%2C_the_forever_prisoners_of_guantanamo/
[23] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0804138214/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[24] https://www.amazon.com/dp/019975411X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[25] https://twitter.com/TomDispatch
[26] http://www.facebook.com/tomdispatch
[27] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467236/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[28] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467244/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[29] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[30] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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