Stuck

Be fixed in a particular position or unable to move.

One word described our situation this weekend, as it describes my state still: stuck.

Our cars died not once, not twice, but thrice as the temperature dropped into the minus teens. Proving that the first symptom of an aged battery is a dead battery, we revived them several times while waiting for our local mechanic to open his garage doors on Monday.

Be unable to continue with a task or solve

Stuck describes a situation most writers experience. Not writer’s block—I’ve never had that—just a little…stuck. I’ve written my new novel to the point where the protagonist—an indentured laborer in 1775— and a collection of secondary characters travel together on a boat from New York Harbor. Sails full and heeled over, the sloop races up the Hudson River. The characters wait for me in that cabin, pitching and rolling, admiring the rosy hue of the Palisades, and the roiling green grey of the river. I’ve written these three migrants across the Atlantic from Bristol, England to Colonial New York. This week I can’t move them more than a few miles north of the slip in lower Manhattan. The characters are stuck: sick, hungry, cold, and scared. We’re all stuck, but I’m the only one who is real—the characters and their discomforts are imaginary.

From the Imaginary to the Unimaginable

I usually solve this writer’s problem—become unstuck—during walks or during the wee hours when awake—when I’m very much not asleep. During the past few days though, my tossing and turning has been fueled by thoughts of the children held in cages on our southern border. It’s not the first time that I’ve writhed with anger, frustration, and shame about those kids at 3 AM. It won’t be the last either, but I’ve taken the advice of the great @Zerlina Maxwell (zerlinamaxwell.com) in deciding to DO something, not just feel something about it. So I’ve put together a list of links (see below) to organizations that are actually doing something to help these innocent children. All of them accept donations, all offer a type of direct action, the ACLU offers to place direct calls to congressional offices so that we easily can exhort our representatives to DO something.

Be unable to get rid of or escape from

Every day the children get older and become more damaged. Every day the chances of reunion with their parents becomes more remote (but that was the plan wasn’t it?—there was no expectation by our government to reunite the families—there certainly was no plan in place).

In the years to come, this incarceration and separation will be viewed as a crime at least equal to our internment of Japanese-American citizens—and the theft of their property, never to be returned—during WWII. A few years prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, we turned away ships containing refugees fleeing the Nazi regime. The ships wandered in search of safe harbor, were rarely successful, and returned to the home port and certain death for the passengers. That stain stretches back to the beginning of the country and the use of slavery and genocide to build it; that it stretches forward is unimaginable, but here we are. And there are the caged children: living in the refrigerated detention centers, scared, sad, and angry. Stuck.

Bartlett’s Roget’s Thesaurus—Stuck: Holed (stabbed), motionless, tied, connected, adhering, troubled

We are stuck in a time and in a country where children live in cages, sleeping on gym mats with aluminum blankets. The unthinkable is in practice. In his State of the Union Address last night, the president never mentioned the children in cages. With atavistic relish, he described their parents as criminals. The desperate parents who brought them here—believing we would help—are people who came with nothing and lost everything.