12/12/20

By Josh Rubin

The closer they come, the harder it is to look away. That is why we place so many hurdles in the way of people who take to their feet and begin the long, slow march to save their lives. And the lives of their children.

At the frontier of Guatemala, Hondurans driven from their homes by an enraged climate, hurricane upon hurricane, are stopped and asked for papers, and for proof they are not carrying Covid. If they get past, and they ever reach Mexico, they must traverse a landscape burning with the disease that takes down the old, and the weak.

And then then comes the wall of hate, built with our own hands and hearts, a towering monument to racism and greed. Those that make it across face the cruelty of entrepreneurial prison keepers, where abuse, disease and neglect fill days, waiting for deaf dumb and blind justice to let them out, those that make it this far, into the life that has not yet been battered out of them.

Or, sent back, to start again.