11/11/22

By Josh Rubin

I’m looking at the calendar

Thanksgiving is coming soon. Christmas carols will start playing at the big box stores any minute. The midterms are just over, or not quite over, with a sense of relief and foreboding all at once.

And in 20 days or so (who knows when or if you will see this—Facebook is mysterious…) a group of people from all over the country will convene, having dusted off their shoes and packed their bags for a trip to the southern border. Well, not just TO the border. A trip along the whole damn border. From the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, with lots of stops in between….

We call it the Journey for Justice. Or el Peregrinaje por la Justicia. We will pile into cars and pickups, haul trailers, wave signs. We will deploy our eyes, we will be witnesses. We dream of being like the butterfly that flaps its wings somewhere remote, that stirs things up, that multiplies a kind of chaos that causes that wall, that line, that scar in the earth to tremble.

Witnessing is not a one way street, ever. We look. We see. We report on what’s out there. We hope that others take note, which may or may not cause some needle to tilt. But one thing is for certain: we ourselves will change. We will see, we will learn of the damage done. Our weary eyes will cloud with tears.

But those same eyes will do the work of envisioning a different world. We will raise those eyes to the unbroken, unowned sky. The land and the sky are not ours.

We are theirs.

Join us. There is still time: Information on the Journey for Justice!