2019, looking like 1939. Photo by Sergio Flores/Washington Post via Getty

As we prepare to blow up this unholy year, what lingers most chillingly are its crimes against brown humanity, its "irreparable and unnecessary harm done to so many" by a malignant, increasingly deranged gangster in the White House reduced to whining, lying and raging - hence the maxim, "The louder the monkey, the smaller the balls" - as his cruelties persist. Thousands of vulnerable children, ripped from parents and often sick, still languish in tents in awful conditions at the border. Not just immorally but flagrantly illegally, more continue to join them. At Christmas, a holiday celebrating the birth of a refugee child, humane volunteers managed to deliver piteously modest gifts to some kids, but others were arrested. From one disbelieving father, "This is Santa Claus coming in to give toys to the unwanted, and you're doing what?"

And Rocio Rebollar Gomez, a grandmother and mother to a U.S. Army intelligence officer will be deported Jan. 2 to her violent hometown of Acapulco despite a long legal battle, though over 30 years in the U.S. she worked two jobs, paid her taxes, put her kids through college and bought a small house while twice having to leave, return to her kids, and restart her life. She has no criminal record, but must now wear an ankle bracelet. We all know who should: The racist thugs who have inflicted these abuses - who have unfathomably denied medical care to caged children in flu season, and arrested doctors offering it, though six kids have already died; the officials cleared of wrongdoing in those deaths; the rich son who compared cages to zoos protecting us from "animals"; the complicit daughter who dismissed the kids in them as "not part of my portfolio"; the Nazis and sadists who help the Monster-In-Chief reduce thousands of desperate human beings to "these people," to be kept out. May the new year bring the overdue dawning of a moral reckoning, and at least a modicum of justice.

"Will we say, as so many Germans said, that we just didn't know? And if we do, can we imagine anyone believing that?"- Jaime O'Neill