10/16/20

By Josh Rubin

It is tempting to imagine that we are living in end times. Those of us who are older and confined to quarters as the pandemic spikes might conflate our own fates with the fate of the world. The dead end in front of me could indeed be for me alone, or it might be for everyone. Those who speak of end times look for signs, and there are signs everywhere. Fires burning out of control, great storms, the pandemic itself. For me, the disappointments with the eruptions of age, flareups in body and mind, are signs as well.

And for those of us in this group, who have chosen to watch, agog, the worldwide war on those humans who have joined that oh-so-human and just as natural activity of migration, we see machinery for that war that resembles not a little the Nazi machinery. I grew up in the shadow cast by those camps, indeed they have blocked some of the sun for my whole life. And perhaps prepared me, to my great woe, for the darkness of these times.

None of us need a picture of the world order that shrouds us, but I will sketch it, anyway. Sketch the system of racism and class that draws lines inside our borders but also draws all national borders themselves. The question is, who shall come in and who shall not, which becomes who shall have and who shall not, and cannot disguise who shall live and who shall not.

They are shutting off the power and carting away toilets in Matamoros. They are forcing Africans onto planes to land them whence they fled in terror. They are doubling and tripling the expulsions of Haitians to that land never forgiven for the refuge it once, long ago, offered to those we enslaved, punished ever since. They have found a tiny port of entry in Arizona to use to march refugees into the hands of the criminal cartels.

Overhead there are enough flights by the boxcars in the sky to darken every last day. Maybe, I suppose it is possible, that a good outcome in the election will let in some light, will muffle the roar of the machinery of inequality. But we will long live in the shadows, the darkness of the long, long shadows, while the hungry and frightened march toward us. And those shadows will take a long time to pass. If we have the time.