Song for a Russian child!
We remember back in 1994 when we attended a concert in which our own step daughter sang with others of her age at an area high school. It was a rare collaboration among groups that were not usually together and the sound that they produced after but one day of practice was truly amazing. Former president Richard Nixon was very ill in a New York hospital at the time and at the very time that my daughter and the others sang “Song for a Russian child” we later learned that Nixon had passed away. It was fitting, perhaps that it ended that way because Richard Nixon was an internationalist par excellent and had opened the door to China and began serious nuclear disarmament discussions with the Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev at a place called Glassboro in the United States.
There was very little talk of the adoption of Russian children by American citizens at that time and we have no idea if any of it was going on at the time. However, over sixty thousand Russian children have been adopted and brought to America in the intervening years since legal adoptions have been allowed between the two nations. A doctor friend of ours and his wife went to Russian a number of years ago and brought back two beautiful Russian children who graced their home and enlarged their lives until they were finally raised and grown, to become productive American citizens of their own. It was not inexpensive to acquire these children. As we remember it, the total cost at the time was in excess of twenty five thousand dollars per child. We suppose that it brought in needed cash into the Russian economy and helped to change the lives of those in Russia who were associated with those children. Now, Russia is flush with oil money and apparently sees the need to make political statements over the need to allow care for its own. The first Russian president--Boris Yeltsin--who perhaps began these adoptions, is now long dead and has been replaced with a man who stood on the opposite side from him when Yeltsin stood atop that tank and secured Russian independence!
And, now, Vladimir Putin has signed a measure passed by the Russian legislature that has banned these type of adoptions. There were fifty two children set to come to the United States who have been swept up in this international political wrangle who will now, after bonding with their American parents, have to find someone else to raise them to adulthood. Or, these Russian children will stay permanently in the Russian orphanages in which so many of them already live. The reason for Putin and the Russian legislatures actions is a retaliation for an act signed by President Obama to stop United States participation in some sort of human rights abuse that was going on in Russia.
Children are human and they have rights too!
The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, and, despite what the neoconservative Republicans would like for us to believe about Latinos and others, these immigrants have done nothing but strengthen this nation across time and across its relations with other nations. These Russian children, many of whom are now adults, will take their place and intermarry and further diversify what is uniquely the American blood line even further than what it already is. This has been going on ever since the first immigrants arrived at the Jamestown colony in 1607 and it will continue on as long as this nation continues to exist. Even at the 1620 Plymouth colony, there were saints who were puritans and their were sinners who weren’t and we are sure without further investigation that some of their young intermarried and increased the American blood stock and began the tradition that has gone on ever since.
When one uses the term, the American melting pot, it is no lie. And, as one American commentator once noted, the United States is indeed, the first universal nation on earth!
It is sad to know that fifty two sets of American parents who wanted children so badly will now have to look elsewhere for those that they had already come to invest so heavily in love and in grace. And, it is sadder still to know that relations between the United States and Russia have sunken to such a low place in our intertwined histories that innocent children are now sucked into the maelstrom of what is going on between the two nations. One Russian official has said that there are so many Russian children in need of good homes that this crass political move might affect the nation in its entirety as it moves forward. And, news reports have stated that one Russian billionaire is offering fifty thousand dollars to any Russian family who will adopt one of the fifty two children who are now, once again, without parents. It is little solace to those who wanted and were willing to pay dearly for the privilege of having a child to raise and to love. It has been said that the loss of a child is perhaps the most devastating thing that can happen to parents in their lifetimes. It is not something that anyone wants to see happen to anyone else, particularly during the Christmas season which is, after all, the season of the child. God knows we have already seen enough of it in Connecticut already this year! Will these parents have the courage to look elsewhere or will they simply live with the memories of what is no longer as they exist in a twilight world strung out between what is and what might have been?
Life and politics can be so cruel sometimes, and, the innocent are, all too often, the ones who have to pay!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKi8B77FDGg
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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