10/31/22

By Josh Rubin

A wall of boxcars.

Such an age we live in! It finds us wondering if things are worse than ever before. Or does it just feel that way?

We can feel it in the air, hear it, damn near smell it. As the world slouches toward a massive crisis of dislocation—homelessness, statelessness—the response that predominates runs a gamut from pearl-clutching to gun-wielding. Others—and I am in this camp—are afraid. We live in an unholy mixture of fear of the people we may meet outside our cocoons and grasping at straws to thatch houses of hope for the kind of cooperation that will mitigate the suffering we see at our margins.

On our border pilgrimage, the Journey for Justice, we know some of what we will find. We know, because we have been speaking to people in the borderlands. They tell us of their utter exhaustion, facing defeat after defeat in their struggles to defend the right of migration, with the clamor of hatred all around them. The weariness runs deep, and still they rise each day to bail a boat taking the waters of reaction and frenzied violence against the poorest of the earth.

We will see the violence of the wall, now being built with the detritus of our industrial society, boxcars stacked on each other. As if they can’t hear the echoes of recent history tell them of those relics’ central place in bringing death. Or perhaps, worse, they do hear them.

We will travel the border, all of it, not triumphantly, but sadly. But there will be the joy of embracing people we unite with, we shelter with, in the stormy times we live in. We will come out of our pandemic crouch, even if afraid, and embrace the solidarity that for moments tell us we are not alone. And that those across the border who stand at the gates of our militarized city on a hill, that we see them, that they are also not alone. For as long as we may see.