When I was in Graduate School, one of my courses was, The Great American Novel. One of our required novels was Moby Dick.
In this great novel, Captain Ahab of the ship Peqoud seeks Moby Dick, the great white whale. Ahab wants to kill the whale as an act of vengeance because the animal crippled him by chewing off his leg. Ahab is obsessed with tracking down the whale even to the point of ignoring his responsibility to the ship’s crew and investors.
In one scene, the Pequod comes across the ship Rachel. “In response to Ahab's usual first question ("Hast seen the White Whale?"), the Rachel's captain reports that his fastest whaleboat, with his own son aboard, has just recently been lost at sea due to an encounter with Moby Dick. He entreats Ahab to help in the search for his lost son.” Ahab refuses and sets sail in pursuit of his only goal, the destruction of the white whale.
His obsession with destroying this whale not only destroys Ahab but also the crew of the Pequod who aided and abetted Ahab. The only survivor is Ishmael who narrates the story.
Clearly this scene is an allusion to the story of Herod in the New Testament who ordered the massacre of all male children under the age of two. Matthew 2:18 tells us, “In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”
What a metaphor for today. Our ship of state, America, is captained by an insane Captain Trump who is aided and abetted by a crew of evangelicals and right wingers. Like Ahab and Herod, Trump is obsessed with attacks on immigrants even to the point of ripping children from the arms and breasts of their mothers. Weeping and wailing, these children are tossed on the ash heap of ICE bigotry. These are the fruits of “Captain Trump.”
Evangelicals, adding and abetting Trump, scream and yell about protecting fetuses in wombs, but speak nothing when it comes to immigrants’ children being “untimely ripped” from from their mothers and fathers. They speak nothing when they learn that ICE has lost 1500 children. They speak nothing about Captain Trump’s pedophilia. They speak nothing when Trump wants to take children off health insurance.
WHAT KIND OF MONSTERS ARE YOU? HOW LOATHSOME! HOW DESPICABLE! Words fail me to describe how twisted your souls have become.
I don’t know if there will be a judgement day but I an imagine that God (if there is one) will gladly cast you into the lake of fire, the ocean of outer darkness, just as you by your silence and bigotry have cast innocent children onto the ash heap.
Ron