1/17/21

By Josh Rubin

We have been to the border. We have seen people on both sides of the border. Many of generous spirit and intellect will admit that on both sides the people are worthy of sympathy. Others, like us, who have stood on both sides of that line of guns and uniforms and rusted steel, have had our natural sympathies heightened, and it has become for us that thing which most enrages those less generous: a deep revulsion for the institutions that block the flow of suffering humanity toward the light, toward life.

During quiet hours in the cotton fields of Tornillo, and there were many hours along the fences and bollard barriers on our side of the river, I would muse about flying creatures, orange-headed blackbirds, who would settle in the thousands from an undivided sky. Also while there I spent time in petty squabbles about where I could stand and where I could not. The threats against me, threats implied by guns mounted in pickups, or explicit in the words arrest or removal, for me a pageant, cloaked in my whiteness. For the tent-imprisoned children there were threats never spoken, the loss of love and touch and family.

This morning I forced myself to watch video as the brutal club of the Guatemalan army came down on heads bared to the same sky, as infinite as our lives are finite. And I saw, left on the path, some of the blood in their bodies, blood that surges toward the light. More blood. They call it a caravan, a word used to frighten, though I don’t know why.

People migrate. They have their reasons. They are always good reasons. No one leaves their life behind on a lark. Even larks have their reasons, and we never question them. I will save my questions for the builders of walls and prisons and the guns they carry.