5/15/20

By Josh Rubin

My subject is breathing. How to keep breathing, when the horror of what is happening leaves you in an exhale, and has you wondering if you can win the battle against despair that keeps you in the bottom of your breath, not knowing where the spirit will come from that will suck you back into the world, and suck the oxygen of the sad world back into your lungs.

Here, on this page, we do this: we watch what is happening at one of the margins of our world. A liminal region which, for me, etches in deep relief the worst of intentions of our social order, and its worst consequences. Looking at this is a choice I and others have made, and in our darkest moments, for me at least, it is a choice I regret, but that I cannot change.

Because it takes my breath away. Breathing is much on my mind. I live in a city so deeply infected, so ravaged by disease, that I imagine I can hear the mechanical wheezing of ventilators forcing breath into the comatose breathless. And, I admit, I imagine myself in their place, or not quite in their place, wishing instead that I had made it clear in writing, early enough so that they would allow me to leave my lungs empty, at the bottom of that last breath, if things come to that.

So, Covid is the backdrop. In the foreground for me, the things that are being done at those frontiers we watch. In Matamoros, fully fenced now, those who pass in and out must have a reason. We do not know what reasons qualify. We know what a prison is.

In ICE family detention, families are being coerced into giving up their children using the threat of contagion as leverage. At the border, desperate people are turned back, even children alone, without a hearing. Hear no evil. But like the rhythm of the mechanical breathing, the regular flights returning the desperate refugees to their desperation (rhymes with respiration) continue their regular rounds. As a nation nearly comatose with fear breathes on.

Enough to take your breath away, isn’t it?

Deep breath.