4/21/21

By Josh Rubin

It is so much harder, so much more painful, to protect our privilege by building walls and carrying guns, than it is to open our hearts and hands, to stop cleaving to our fear. Our border, the one we maintain to keep out migrants, is not our strength, but our weakness.

So many live in the fear that we will lose what we have. We celebrate free markets and a flimsy sense of social safety, and so few of us are free. Who are we protecting against the “invaders”? The poor and hungry that live in our shadows? The beggars with open hands along the city streets and at stoplights and under bridges everywhere in this land of the free?

It is no wonder we worry as so many teeter on the edge of disaster. Some would have us turn our fear toward the southern border, to fret that the barriers we have built will not hold against the rising tides of need, and encourage us to take up arms. Lamentably, it is not hard to fan flames among the tinder of chronic insecurity and fear. In the land where we are free to face destitution, a rent check or mortgage payment or medical bill away from homelessness.

But some of us know, and we must convince others, that when we look across that border—and we must look, we must witness—we don’t see the enemy. We see ourselves, there but for grace...

Let us link arms and turn together toward those who hoard the world’s wealth, and keep it behind the walls of the banks, made of marble, vaults, as in the words of an old song, filled with silver. They cannot spend it all, can they?