I Deeply Hope That 84-Year-Old Mrs. Guthrie Is Returned Home, Safely... And I Do Wonder About... Nearly 95,000 "Missing" Young Black Girls In America...

I absolutely understand why the public becomes fixated, when a relative of a celebrity goes missing. And certainly, this one has been full of dramatic twists and turns -- and involves a deeply-sympathetic 84 year old mom of outstanding character. I fervently hope she is returned home, safely. [But candidly, the statistics would sadly say that each day now that she remains unfound. . . increases the odds that she is never found -- at least not. . . alive.]

And. . . I think we all should take a breath, and realize there are probably now over 100,000 young Black and brown women who've also "disappeared" in America (just since 2022) -- and we do not even know their names, let alone their stories. And in point of fact, far fewer resources are moving toward finding any of them. [There are also over 200,000 white women (most of limited means) similarly missing, too -- and none of us know even 1% of those names. . . and stories.]

I want these faceless ones to matter, too. We all do. And we need to allocate AWAY from ICE interdiction slush funds, and deploy those billions to finding the missing women and children. That is what a humane society would do. Here's a now-rather-dated Biden era explainer from the DoJ. Trump hasn't bothered to update anything like this, since taking office (as it doesn't fit into his narrative of imagined other-ness and divisiveness):

. . .[A]ccording to a recent study published in the peer-reviewed general medical journal The Lancet, Black women are six times more likely to be murdered than their white peers. These stark and tragic statistics reveal and underscore systemic issues of bias, neglect, and a lack of resources that hinder effective responses to this crisis. . . .

According to the National Crime Information Center, in 2022, of the 271,493 girls and women reported missing, 97,924, or over 36 percent, were Black, despite the fact that Black women and girls comprised only 14 percent of the U.S. female population at the time. . . .

Tell the Congress -- that money we are going to allocate AWAY from ICE -- ought to go, at least in part, to these efforts. And to feeding the one in five Americans who regularly go hungry, here in this privileged society. Onward.

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