11/29/21

By Josh Rubin

If it seems to you that things are getting worse, it is because they are. The fears, real and imagined, that thicken every breath we take are freezing the political landscape into a tableau for the end times. Desperation charges the air. The poor are forced to their feet by the shrinking prospects for a home life where they live, and the rich, well, oddly they live in fear of their outsized share having its belt tightened. And we all, yes all of us, awaken each day to talk of twin apocalypse, climate change that moves its massive anti-glacier toward us, steep and quick enough to cast a mighty shadow; and the plague, which threatens us afresh and ominously with the Greek alphabet.

And in the roar of these times, it is hard to make ourselves heard above the puny but still larger efforts of those who pile up barriers against the free movement of people, movement which is the rational act of adaptation to a world in disarray. Hard to deny that policy makers might benefit from a little perspective, the kind that would situate migration as a grassroots remedy for some, and refocus us all instead on a displacement that endangers all humans.

Not just privilege. Not just wealth.

Humanity is on the line. Even in those towers.