Roma children are still children

I'm not sure how much you've heard about the Roma/gypsy issue in Italy, but this recent story caught my eye.  Photos taken of the bodies of two girls, drowning victims, lying on the beach under towels with just their feet sticking out - and in the background, people are sunbathing. Just hanging out on the beach like nothing had happened (the girls were laid out for an hour).  The accompanying story depicts how beach goers continued with their sunbathing, swimming, and picnicking as the coroner lifted the two girls' bodies into coffins and carried them off the beach.  

Could you each lunch as you watch a medical examiner put the bodies of children into coffins?  I don't care what race they are, whether they are legal or illegal immigrants - they are human children.  Human children who had hopes & dreams; children who had parents, siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews and grandparents.

I'd like to think that if I was on a beach where any child died, I'd have the decency to at least lose my appetite.  Leave, cry, whatever - but not sit there and eat my lunch as I watched. How could someone do that?  How could someone HUMAN do that and not be physically ill?

They only way anyone could do that is if they didn't value human life. Racists would do that.  Was World War II so long ago that we still cannot see the dehumanizing of life when it happens right before our eyes?  The Roma people were sent to Dachau (if not shot on sight); their women have been sterilized by governments against their will as recently as 1977; they have been enslaved and subject to ethnic cleansing throughout history.  Just this past May, Roma camps were attacked and set on fire by residents of Naples, Italy.  

The dehumanization of a group of people is the first step in extermination. We've seen this play out over and over again - it's one of the oldest tricks in the book.  Sadly, I fear that because it is happening in Italy, which is not located in the middle east, or in Africa, we'll just sit and watch it ramp up until genocide once again rears its ugly head. 

In America, we have our own issues with illegal immigration. It's a big issue, and we can't agree on how to solve it. But I do at least hope that if immigrant children drowned in front of some of our citizens, we don't just shrug and go on eating our lunch. Maybe that's misguided... our nation was formed on the back of slavery, and we continue to have major race relation issues. Not long ago, we put our own Japanese Americans in concentration camps - well within the lifetimes of those still living.   But I'll continue to hope that we can keep a clear line between political issues and the value of human life. 

Once we start classifying groups of people as "them", "they" or "those people" giant red signal flares should go off in our heads.  Step one: dehumanize them.  Step two: extermination.   

I'm sure there were at least a few people on that beach that were horrified - I'm guessing they left before the photographer took his photograph. For all I know, those who were enjoying the sun amidst that horror could have been American tourists, hell bent on getting that perfect vacation they paid good money for. Regardless, I hope the people who were crass enough to enjoy their beach time will someday learn a little bit about compassion and human dignity.  I'd like to think they'd be shamed into it after seeing their photograph plastered in newspapers throughout the world. But I doubt it.