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Surely we have all seen the photos of the Boy in the Blue Bunny Hat

My question today is How Did the Photos Make You Feel?  You may have dismissed the images entirely. In a glance, you may have rationalized: “He’ll get over it, He’s just a kid!”

But exactly – The Boy in the Blue Hat IS just a kid — a little boy with a fragile heart.

As I process the damages that are part of the ways that ICE is brutalizing  children and whether or not these experiences will have lasting effects on them, I am reminded of myself, when I was about the age of Liam the Bunny Hat Boy.

Somehow, I saw an old movie in which marauding warriors carried an old pioneer woman out of her frontier cabin. She was still in her bed. The other family members  were terrorized, too, but for years, I had nightmares that my grandmother would be carried away. I was  traumatized–even though I personally had suffered no attack.

If the pictures of the little boy in the bunny hat do not bother you, I conjecture that you have lost your child’s heart:

³ Then he said, “I tell you the truth, unless you … become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven. Matthew 18:3

Most children are compassionate–they have the ability to empathize. In my opinion, this nation’s loss of empathy is destroying it.

Empathy is an ability to enter into another person’s pain–to be affected by it. Empathy is beyond sympathy — and many Americans have lost the ability to sympathize, too.

When I look at the photos of the boy in the bunny hat, I do more than feel sorry for him. I feel his hurt. His pain hurts my heart.

I want the brutalization of other humans to stop. This nation needs to feel the pain being inflicted upon other human beings — one person at a time.