Emmett Till and the American present

I saw a social media post last night about Emmett Till's funeral. About how his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open casket funeral because "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby."

I've known that history for a long time. I've seen the picture of Till's brutalized body and read too much about the torture and cruelty inflicted on him through racism and white supremacy and the inexplicable, to me, fact that some people are able to look at other people and see them as less than human. To be so insistent that those people are less than human that brutality becomes the way to try to make the insistence reality. 

I've known. But last night when I saw that social media post about that familiar history, I was hit by a simply crushing wave of grief. Grief at what was done to that beautiful child, grief at what his mother went through – that she lived the rest of her life knowing what they did to her baby. Knowing not just that he was dead but that he lived his last hours in agony and terror. 

Reader, you don't have to tell me that I'm displacing my horror at what is going on in the United States today onto a historical event.

I hope in 70 years the United States is a place where the basic reaction to looking back at what is happening now is horror. Horror at the Guatemalan children woken up in the middle of the night and loaded onto planes for deportation. Horror at the family with a U.S. citizen child, a child who has brain cancer, deported to Mexico. At the hundreds of men sent to CECOT, a concentration camp, where they were beaten, sexually assaulted, and tortured. At the terror being inflicted by the government on the people of cities that Donald Trump doesn't like because they vote for Democrats and have a lot of Black people or a lot of immigrants or both. Not cities that are uniquely lawless or violent. Just cities with Black people and immigrants and Democrats. Horror, too, at the denial of medical care to trans people. The "open cruelty" to trans troops being stripped of their careers in the military. 

Should I go on? There are the horrors inflicted by abortion bans. The brain-dead Georgia woman whose body was kept on life support as an incubator for her baby. Her mother says, "I want them to know that this didn't have to happen. I want them to know that the law needs to be changed. It doesn't need to be altered. It doesn't need to be in effect at all. Women have rights; it's their body." Then there are the women denied care for miscarriages because doctors fear the effects of abortion bans. And the many women who do not want to be pregnant, but are being forced to be because they have no other choice. Research shows that they will be more likely to live in poverty and will suffer from worse health than if they had been able to get the abortions – the medical care – they sought.

I hope that Americans decades from now will look back and see how evil this all was. I also know that Donald Trump and all of his far more competent henchmen are doing their level best to turn the U.S. into a place where we take these things for granted, or are too terrified to say otherwise.