Jenna Bush. Where are your tears for the rest of America?

Christine Merser, July 8, 2025

I can’t believe I’m going to talk about Jenna Bush again. But yesterday, on her morning show, she covered the floods in Texas. She was teary-eyed, speaking about the strength of Texans, their resilience, their ability to endure the unimaginable. She talked about the camp, about the unspeakable loss of children’s lives. The kind of loss that keeps you up at night. I don’t take any of that away. Not one ounce of it.

But something about the whole thing bothered me. Visually, emotionally. There was something off I couldn’t quite place. And then last night, it came to me.

Jenna Bush has been on the air every morning for months. Not one tear for anyone else. Not one.

She has seen the pain playing out all across America. The kind that doesn’t make it to soft morning television segments. She has seen good mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, twisted from each other’s arms and dragged away in the streets in broad daylight. Taken by men with weapons and masks. Thrown into vans. Sometimes never heard from again.

She has seen the footage of a six-year-old child sitting alone in a court, representing himself in a language he did not speak. The judge asked him if he understood and he shook his head no. These children are not criminals. They are not a threat. They are children.

She has seen the photographs of men who pick the fruit her children eat for breakfast, ripped from their homes and deported in violation of court orders, back to places like El Salvador where they are beaten or killed. She has seen the flag flying above that brutality, and she has said nothing.

She has agency. She can insist.

She has seen millions of Americans take to the streets in protest. Not for a single event, but for a system of cruelty that was seeded in part by her own father’s administration and has since metastasized.

So where are her tears for them?

Where is her segment on their resilience?

Where is the mournful reflection on how much they have lost, how much they endure, how they go on raising children and cleaning houses and building lives in the shadow of a country that treats them like invaders?

Where is her grief for them?

The difference between you and me, Jenna, is that I am grieving and outraged for both those lost in the flood, which could have been avoided, by the way, but let’s not even talk about that today, and I am outraged and grieving for those picked off the streets in my country and put in concentration camps that are heralded on places like Etsy. Are you really only capable of grieving for people who look like you? I wish the next time you were interviewed someone would ask you the question.

I can hear it now. I’ll get some pushback about how this is not the time to compare the two. This is absolutely the time. And I have every right to ask the question. I have sent my contribution to Texas, even though I consider it the lawless country on its own. But my efforts, my heart and commitment are to those who have no agency of their own. And Jenna Bush? I hope someone asks her the questions that I wonder if she asks herself.

Because I am sickened. Sickened by white America, represented by the Jenna Bushes of the country, and its relentless ability to grieve for reflections of itself and no one else. Give them a mirror to look into and they are all in. But show a brown person? Sickened by the way pain is only allowed to register if the faces are familiar, if the names sound right, if the landscape matches something out of a personal scrapbook.

I do not diminish the suffering of families in Texas. I hold it fully. But I refuse to let that grief obscure the scale of what’s been happening elsewhere. What has already happened. What continues every day.

There is a mirror in front of Jenna Bush. And in it, she sees only what she wants to see.

And it sickens me.

Please take to social media and ask her where her humanity for the rest of America is?