I absentmindedly scratched the back of my hand about a week ago, wondering if a mosquito had feasted on my blood the night before. Within a couple of hours, I stopped blaming the innocent mosquito, realizing that my weed-pulling binge had put me in contact with poison ivy. What started out as an isolated bump or two has taken over my body. Hands, arms, legs, ears (pushing my hair behind them), waist (hitching up my pants) – the dreaded rash has been an ever-present companion for over a week now, and I’m more than ready to say farewell to its blotches and bumps, and the burning desire to scratch my arm off.
Dr. Mark Andrews tells us that an itching sensation of the skin arises due to the stimulation of pruriceptors, our itch-sensing nerve endings, by mechanical, thermal or chemical mediators. He also admits that “despite approximately a century of pruritus (itching) research, there is no single effective antipruritic treatment . . .” Having sampled a variety of drug store remedies this past week, I fully agree with his assessment.
It may seem a stretch to make a comparison between the itching skin caused by poison ivy and the toxins being released by current events involving children, but recent reports in the news are activating the C-fibers in my heart and soul, those specialized nerve cells that trigger the urge to itch, so I might remember as well as raise awareness of the plight of these little ones.
In May, our government changed its policy about families who cross the border, resulting in children being torn apart from parents. The Justice Department decided to prosecute all those apprehended for illegally crossing the border as criminal cases instead of civil cases, as had been the previous practice. Wanting to use this example as a deterrent to others, parents are jailed and their children placed into “foster care or whatever,” according to Chief of Staff John Kelly. A Border Patrol official testified that 658 children were taken from their parents in just two weeks in early May.
Ms. G., a Mexican woman quoted in a recent A.C.L.U. suit, went to an official border crossing point and requested asylum with her 4-year-old son and her blind 6-year-old daughter. As Nicholas Kristof reports, “None of them had broken American law, yet the children were taken from their mother.” “I have not seen my children for one and a half months,” the mother wrote in her declaration. “I worry about them constantly and don’t know when I will see them.”
In the timeframe of news reporting, this story is at least a week old, but it continues to itch in my soul. As I watch my grandchildren run freely through the backyard sprinkler, I can’t stop thinking about the hundreds of children separated from their parents at the border. Immigration is complicated, but this is not the America I know. If we as a nation truly believe that every child matters, we must figure this out.
My soul also itches for families in Puerto Rico still without electricity, even as the new hurricane season approaches. My soul itches for the children whose parents are swept up in the opioid epidemic in communities across our nation, including here in Northeast Ohio. My soul itches for Somalian refugee children in the Kakuma and Dadaab camps in Kenya, and for Syrian refugee children in the Urfa and Gaziantep camps in Turkey.
The poison ivy plant is tenacious. Unless its roots are dug up, it continues to grow. And once its oils make contact with skin, most of us will suffer, as there is no single effective antipruritic treatment, not even rubbing your skin with a banana peel.
I will be thrilled when the pruriceptors in my skin stop reacting to the urushiol of the poison ivy plant, hopefully sooner rather than later. But I also want the pruriceptors of my soul to be fully sensitive to the toxic forces that continue to harm children in our neighborhoods and around the world, until the day when the traumatic roots of fear, poverty, abuse, neglect, disaster, addiction, and war are gone forever.
Now please pass the calamine lotion.
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