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I don’t know about you, but I have an uneasy feeling about Texas Rangers snatching 416 children from their parents based on an anonymous phone call that may have been from a crazed woman in Colorado who has a history of making false allegations. Am I over-reacting because this comes on the anniversary of Waco and the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing that was supposedly in response to the Waco massacre? The Branch Dividian ranch in Waco, Texas, and the residents inside were incinerated April 19, 1993, exactly 15 years ago last Saturday. No one has been punished for those lives lost.
Both instances involved a so-called “religious cult” whose members have virtually isolated themselves from the rest of society and seem to mind their own business. Janet Reno, President Clinton’s Attorney General at the time of Waco, apparently gave approval to a plan that resulted in the massacre of 76 civilians, including 21 children.
The primary difference between the Branch Dividians in Waco, Texas, and the Yearning for Zion Ranch in San Angelo, Texas, is that the leader of the Branch Dividians resisted the raid on their homes, school and church and the residents of the Yearning for Zion Ranch offered no resistance.
The Branch Dividian children were incinerated and are dead. The Yearning for Zion children were taken from their parents in a warlike raid by domestic police wearing body armor, carrying automatic weapons and backed by an armored personnel carrier, After the children and their mothers were taken from their homes, the children over age 4 were separated from their mothers and plans are being made to place them in foster homes. The only exception is that the children age 4 years and younger have been left with their mothers until the state completes DNA testing.
I was horrified as I watched on television the attack and incineration of the men, women and children at Waco, yet few Americans protested the atrocities committed by our Government under the Clinton Administration. There is even less opposition to what is happening to the people in San Angelo by the American public it seems.
Have we as a people become so brainwashed, desensitized and uncaring that we are only willing to take a stand when the knock comes at our front door? Would any rational individual think it is just to separate 416 children from their parents and put them in foster homes because the mother of one of them may have been 14 or 15 years old and forced by some custom to conceive by a man much older than she?
I am concerned about the direction of our country and the lessons not learned from Waco and the lack of public interest in the current atrocities being committed against children in San Angelo. It is a painful reminder of many conversations I had with intelligent Germans during a tour of duty in Germany ten years after the end of World War II. They either ignored or saw nothing wrong of what their government was doing to men, women and children that had been determined undesirable by their government. They simply didn’t want to deal with it.
That seems to be where we have arrived in 2008. We are in denial. We don’t want to acknowledge that we have allowed the liberty and freedom handed to us by our parents and grandparents and forefathers to slip away because we were too busy enjoying our new car, television set, golf game or business deal. We don’t want to be bothered with the problems of some strange religious group outside a small town in West Texas. They must deserve to have their children stripped from them and placed in a home with strangers because they are not regular folks that drift with the wind like us. The government would do what is right, wouldn’t they?
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