12/13/22

By Josh Rubin

We are on a journey. We call it a Journey for Justice, but it might have been better to call it a journey of discovery. Although many on our journey think we speak some of the the same languages as those we have come to see, most of us are still strangers. There is a lot to learn.

We have encountered places where golfers play along a line marked by ancient containers reinforcing a fence topped by concertina wire, bordering a river patrolled by armed men in boats as another species of pilgrim contemplates crossing that river and throwing themselves upon the mercy of strangers. Asking for help. For shelter in a storm-ripped world. Pidiendo posada. Is there room for them, for their children?

We have moved into country so vast with desert and mountains that we wonder how anyone could travel very far on foot. So much water would be needed in the desert. Our band of travelers, of seekers, were our cars stripped from us, would perish quickly. In the hot, in the cold, in the hostile borderlands of New Mexico and Arizona, few, if any, would survive without mercy. A few among those we visit are heroically merciful to the migrants from the south, but there are not nearly enough of them. We are led by some of those merciful ones, with open hearts, to taste the immensity of the threat to the strangers from the south. The desert.

The communities we visit live lives sliced in two by the wall, by the currents of humanity in conflict that, like the tectonics made the mountains that rise like giants over the desert, erect a social colossus that casts an inky shadow over the lives of those who live near its slopes. Some are conscripted into the task of defending the wall, others may welcome the stranger. The wall, the border, runs right through towns, right through some families. One must step carefully to live here. Or to visit here.

And the dust kicks up and confuses all of us, keeping us from seeing the truth: we, all of us, are as strangers in a strange land.