Baggs: Shopping trip brings worry about our country

SUGAR HILL, Ga. | Made a quick trip to Walgreens yesterday. Certainly nothing out of the routine as it’s a regular on the “need-to-go” list.

Awaiting my turn to check out, I noticed the Hispanic lady in front of me. Her transaction seemed very routine, as though she had done it hundreds of times before. She interacted with the cashier in a friendly manner, presented a coupon for the two 8-packs of Gatorade she bought with other items, and paid for her purchase with cash, like I would do a few minutes later.

As the mind will do, I idly wondered if maybe she had teenagers at home, or perhaps a husband working in construction. Somebody in need of lots of rehydration at least.

Just another day in the life of modern suburbia.

Until I checked out and walked into the 95-degree heat of Georgia summer radiating up from hot asphalt, and the thought hit me: by tomorrow, that lady could be housed in the sweltering tent city called Alligator Alcatraz.

You would like to think such a future would only be likely if she were in the country illegally, but that’s not necessarily true, as there have been many reports of documented immigrants and American citizens taken in by the zealots of ICE as they work to satisfy the hunger for deportation that drives some in Washington.

Photos of the temporary tent city that is Alligator Alcatraz are reminiscent of nothing so much as the chain-link cages in which animals are kept at rescue shelters. Given its location in the swamps of Florida, it isn’t hard to imagine the heat, the bugs, the odors, the foul plumbing and inadequate facilities that beleaguer those housed there.

Initially, the idea was that only those accused of criminal activity would be sent to the swampy confines. But since we’ve learned many — credible reports suggest most — are guilty only of entering the country illegally and no other crimes. And some not even of that.

As a nation we have historically condemned concentration camps, gulags, “re-education” prisons and a host of other penal abuses of mankind in various countries. And yet here we are.

I think it’s a good thing that we’ve slowed the flow of those coming into the country illegally at the border. Yet we have lost our minds on the issue of deportation, willingly destroying families and individuals in a willy-nilly fashion regardless of the lives they’ve lived or contributions they’ve made to our society.

Three of our grandchildren, all born here to an American mother, have Mexican fathers. Will they one day be sent packing to a foreign country in which they’ve never lived? Are Hispanic features, or a Hispanic name, enough to have them wrangled to the ground by an anonymous mask-wearing agent of the federal government and shipped off to a tent-town protected by dangerous reptiles?

Are we really that heartless and inhumane?

I don’t know the solutions to the problems that Washington never seems capable of solving. But I do know that a nation that claims to have been founded on the principles of Christianity, proclaims itself as a leader of the world, and professes to love freedom and justice, is doing an incredibly bad job of living up to expectations.

And a trip to buy Zyrtec shouldn’t leave you wondering about the very soul of the country you love, or the people who live in it.

Veteran Georgia journalist Norman Baggs wrote this piece for GwinnettForum.com. It is republished with permission.