Those pictures are traumatizing.
That’s because they contain so much more than what’s in them, so much more than horse-mounted U.S. Border Patrol agents at the Rio Grande in Texas, running down and flogging would-be Haitian immigrants. No, those pictures contain George Floyd and forced removal from ancestral land, contain internment camps and the Pettus Bridge, contain every time the state, in its awful power, came down like a hammer on the head of the tired and poor yearning to breathe free.
That’s why social media was set ablaze Monday, why the White House called the pictures “horrific” and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said they were “heartbreaking.” It’s why the Department of Homeland Security launched an investigation.
As well they should. Those pictures contain multitudes.
It is a sad fact that we seem to have lost the thread where America is concerned. Indeed, outside the easy patriotism of Lee Greenwood’s song and the ignorant xenophobia of those who think what America really needs is to be made “great again,” there is real concern about the sustainability of this experiment. America, we once liked to say, is the only nation founded upon an ideal.