4/25/22

By Josh Rubin

We are watching a struggle whose outlines seem clearer everyday. Strong forces cling to an order that hoards the world’s wealth for industrialized countries mostly in the northern hemisphere, enforcing this with policies that resist social justice that would threaten it. The question of migration and the reaction to it by these powers may appear to be but one manifestation of larger patterns of injustice, but, in fact, it is where the consequences of this imbalance becomes most clear.

The haves create the have-nots by centuries of larceny of resources found and produced in the south. The people of the south, squeezed and hungry, try to get into the gated countries of the north to claim their share of the prosperity for themselves and their families. The people of the north fortify their gates and their rationalizations for their hoarding and larceny. God is said to favor the privileged and excuses injustice as some sort of divine justice. There will always be poor, we have been told, and to interfere would go against the natural order.

There are other rationalizations, and they buttress those forces that would maintain the grossly tilted social order. And that is what the struggle is about. And what those of us who watch and fight for the rights of those people who take to their feet to save themselves, what we have found out is that there are no borders when it comes to issues of justice. To see the world as it is, to see the outlines of the struggle for justice, social and economic, we have to look across borders. We have to raise our eyes.

The daily storm of outrageousness and craven politics can take out attention away from the oceanic forces of our times, of our world, if we cave to our social media driven myopia. But we will mistake it for the truth unless we take our eyes up high enough to see those forces, high enough to blur the borders and watch the greater rivers and tide of our times.