The Deathly Stench of trump’s Refugee Ban

Scent is seriously evocative, isn’t it? It intertwines with all the other senses and with memory and emotion. As if the brain chemicals released by odors have a scent of their own that fills your brain and touches every neurotransmitter.

Take this picture of Omran from Syria, for example.

Omran

The visual image brings on a strong sense of smell when you think about it. The primary odor for me is the acrid smell of burning sulfur, like spent sparklers on the Fourth of July. Then there’s that dreadful smell of burning hair that we all know from some mishap or another — perhaps also related to fireworks, or to the unexpected whoosh of a gas stove when you are making pizza from Italy or potatoes from Ireland or sauerkraut from Germany or hummus from the Middle East or coffee from Yemen or black eyed peas from Africa.

I am blessed never to have smelled burning human flesh. As a vegetarian, just the smell of meat cooking can make me gag. I imagine Omran smelled burning flesh the day the bomb went off. He, too, may gag his whole life when he smells meat cooking, but he probably won’t know why. He clearly has top-rung PTSD.

He’s smelling blood, obviously. And smoke. He has just been pulled out of the rubble of his home, so he’s covered with not just ashes, but fine concrete dust, adding that cold earthy smell to his experience.

I don’t know what Omran was doing before the bomb hit. Probably not playing with Play Dough or Legos or crayons like an American child.

Maybe he was hugging his dog and had a musty doggie smell on his shirt. I hope he did not witness his dog getting blown to bits.

Maybe he was helping his mother cook, and now the warm smell of baking flat bread will forever make him gag, too.

That dreadful orange color surrounding Omran smells to me like hot plastic, a Howard Johnson’s booth sticky with maple syrup and hot fudge sauce, baking in harsh sunshine streaming through a streaky window. I don’t know whether Omran will ever taste maple syrup or hot fudge sauce. I know his ten year-old brother Ali won’t. He died of his injuries a few days after this picture was taken.

The smell of coffee gets us up and out of bed in the morning. The smell of microwave popcorn gets us up and out of our cubicle at work. The smell of dinner gets us up, off the couch and into the kitchen.

Will the smells of Omran get us up off our butts and into our Senator’s offices and into the streets and into the airports? Will we remember who we are as Americans before we’ve lost our souls?

At the White House this weekend #MuslimBanProtest

The trump™ supporters who respond to my Tweets on the #MuslimBan call me Snowflake and moron and loser. They say the ban is only for three months and we need to protect ourselves and besides it’s not meant as a Muslim ban, not really.

But I say that the children of Syria are choking on the smell of hate and violence and death. They do not have three months.

 

 

 

 

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