I have my reasons to avoid commenting on the rampage of contentiousness that the Trump administration has been from the get-go. The main reason is how utterly ineffectual my reach is. Having written this blog everyday—every bloody day—for close to a decade I am aware of its efficacy. It is next to nothing.
However, when I see this latest Time cover, I have to offer a couple comments. I wonder whether the publishers obtained the permission of this two-year-old Honduran girl’s mother to juxtapose it with someone who embodies the current political toxicity. The powerful picture of this child was taken by John Moore of Getty Images. The original picture shows parts of two border patrol officers. The girl being a toddler is in no position to give or deny consent to being photographed. It reminds me of an even more dramatic photograph of 5-year-old Elián González, who in April, 1999, became the face of the difficult issue of immigration when he was seized by heavily armed policemen as part of an international custody battle.
In the latest case, Time has photoshopped an image—and cleverly so—to make it into a devastating critique of the Trump Administration’s lunatic policy of separating children from parents entering the United States illegally along the US-Mexican border. Some 2300 children have been separated as part of the government’s zero tolerance policy so far.
Raising the question of permission may sound like distracting from the much larger tragedy caused by the cruel separation. However, I do see the image being manipulated, even if to stop precisely such tragedies, as problematic. One can safely presume that the child’s mother, who was detained, may not be fully aware of the goings-on considering she is in custody awaiting criminal charges for illegally crossing the border. At the very least it is worth debating by those in the media whether it is fair to put a child within such a terribly malignant context. One can argue that the child is already a victim of this horrible system and using an image to possibly try and change that system is useful. I am still not entirely sure.
We have seen such devastating images of children capturing the essence of international conflicts before. The last one to capture the world’s attention was that of a three-year-old Syrian refugee child named Alan Kurdi, whose body washed ashore along the Mediterranean coast On September 2, 2015. That too framed the problem of people forced to flee harrowing conditions in their own countries.
The least the human civilization can do in the much trumpeted 21st century is to ensure that children do not have to be at the receiving end of the follies of mindless adults. Notwithstanding that wish, children seem the inevitable victims of what the way adults have run this world.