Deep gratitude to Cristina Breshears whose writings, wisdom, and vision emanate through the eyes of her heart. These are the wise voices that we need to hear and absorb and be inspired by, a gift to us all. 🙏 Molly
There is something uniquely shattering about watching love be used against itself. I keep thinking about how ordinary love has become dangerous: a child knocking on a door (Minneapolis); parents carrying a sick child toward a hospital (Portland); a mother walking her child to school in the morning light (Houston, Minneapolis, Portland). These are the kinds of moments so familiar it barely registers as courage, though it is one of the oldest acts of faith humans perform. Tending to, caring for, guiding and teaching our children.
These are not acts of resistance. They are acts of care. They are how people try to keep their children alive. But lately, they have been turned into traps, ways to twist the knife into our already shattered hearts.
We are told this is enforcement. Procedure. Policy. But those words feel thin, unable to carry the weight of what is actually happening, what we can see with our own eyes. What is being exploited here is not a loophole in the law. What is being weaponized is not the definition of witness or immigrant or asylum. What is being weaponized is love itself.
Parental love is ancient. It predates borders and statutes and governments. It appears in our myths, our religions, our evolutionary wiring. Every culture recognizes it. Every species depends on it. The instinct to protect one’s child is older than language, older than law. It is imbedded in our marrow.
To hijack that instinct, to force a parent into an impossible calculus where compliance is extracted through their child’s vulnerability, is not merely coercion, it is a moral inversion. It bends the very thing (love!) that binds us to life into a mechanism of control. This is why this moment feels especially grotesque. Something in us knows that children are not supposed to be instruments. We know love is not meant to be leveraged. When that unspoken covenant is broken, the damage does not stay contained. What is done to the most vulnerable does not remain isolated or contained. It is done also to ourselves.
I think this is why these stories lodge so deeply in the body and shake me awake. This is why the ground beneath ordinary life suddenly feels unreliable.
Carl Jung wrote about the collective unconscious – the shared psychic inheritance beneath our individual minds. Archetypes live deep in the recurring patterns that appear across cultures and centuries and foundational myths because they speak to something essential about being human. Among the most powerful of these is the Child.
The child is not just a young person. Archetypally, the child carries possibility, vulnerability, futurity and continuity. The child is the promise that life goes on. This is why children appear in myths as messengers, sacrifices, saviors. When a child is endangered, something ancient within us reacts before ideology or rational thought has a chance to intervene.
We instinctively know the child is never only someone else’s child. The child is everyone’s child.
This is why the injury spreads outward. When children are used as tools of fear, the psyche registers that the future itself is being held hostage. It is not accidental that authoritarian systems fixate on children: their bodies, their education, their movements, their identities. Control of the child is control of tomorrow. To harm the child archetype is to announce: nothing is sacred enough to be spared.
Did you know that when you pull on the pom poms of Liam’s blue bunny hat the floppy ears rise? Did you know Liam’s middle name is Conejo? Do you know conejo means rabbit in Spanish? Liam Conejo Ramos.
I can’t stop thinking about that.
In myth and dream, the rabbit is a liminal creature. A threshold being. It appears at moments of transition, guiding the conscious mind toward something it has not yet learned how to name. Think of the white rabbit leading Alice beyond the edges of the familiar world.
The rabbit symbolizes vulnerability, intuition, alertness, life-force. It is small and easily harmed, yet it survives through sensitivity, through an almost preternatural awareness of danger. It lives between worlds: field and burrow, exposure and shelter.
In Jungian psychology, animals often surface when the psyche is signaling a passage, when the old frameworks no longer hold and something deeper is being demanded.
A child named Rabbit pulled into this machinery of fear feels unbearable not because it is mystical, but because human cruelty has collided with ancient meaning. It tells us, at a level deeper than language, that innocence is no longer protected. That love has become leverage. That we are crossing a threshold whether we want to or not.
Thresholds – those liminal spaces that hold the potential to change us – like the front doors of our homes. Like the parking lots and waiting rooms of hospitals. Like the cross walk or drop-off line at schools. Like the pews of churches.
These are not just locations. They are sanctuaries. They are spaces humanity has collectively agreed must remain safe because life depends on them being so. When violence enters these places, something fundamental shifts. The nervous system understands before the mind catches up: If these places are no longer safe, then nowhere is.
This is how collective wounding works. When love is weaponized, trust erodes. When sanctuary is violated, fear multiplies. When children are used to force compliance, the injury ripples outward into families, communities, institutions, and the shared ancient ground we all stand on.
This is why ordinary acts begin to feel surreal: making dinner, sitting in the sun, laughing with a friend. They feel both necessary and illicit. The nervous system is trying to orient itself in a world where safe ground is no longer guaranteed.
Jung would have called this the shadow emerging. The shadow is the disowned violence of a society acting itself out in public view. When that shadow is projected onto the most vulnerable, the society does not become safer. It becomes hollowed. It loses its soul.
And yet, and yet! The wound also reveals what still matters, what is crucial to protect if we are to survive what is on the other side of the threshold.
If we feel this so viscerally, it is because some part of us refuses to let go of the belief that children should be safe, that love should not be turned into a weapon, that sanctuary must mean something. That refusal is not naïveté. It is conscience. That, my friends, is our humanity refusing to be swallowed by the shadow.
I don’t know what justice will look like yet. I don’t know how long this moment will last or how much repair will be required, how much grieving will overflow as we rebuild. But I do know that naming what is happening matters. Not to inflame, not to aestheticize suffering, but to refuse the normalization of what should never become normal.
When love is turned into a weapon, we must say so. When sanctuary is violated, we must mark the loss. When children are caught in the machinery of fear, we must keep them at the center of the story. Not as symbols, but as lives to be protected, nurtured, loved.
The rabbit pauses at a clearing. A child waits in a detention camp far from the safety of his home. The threshold is before us. What we choose to protect now will shape who we become on the other side. Our children are watching.
image: (Ali Daniels via AP) Columbia Heights Public Schools
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