5/1/21

By Josh Rubin

The things we do have consequences. We are told the flutter of a butterfly wing can stir a mighty tempest a world away. And we, clearly, are not butterflies, and we swing something much heavier more clumsily than anything so delicate.

Everything we are living with can be traced in history. Complicity with corruption in the Northern Triangle and the Caribbean combines with climate change and drives migration. A line can be drawn from human slavery and exploitation of people of color to the construction of a wall both physical and political to choke off, to block, the flow of humanity that springs from the hope and love that is not easily beaten out of those of our species.

Title 42 is what our country is using now to stop migration, to close the border. We conspire with other nations to build a mighty dam against migrant humanity. Any fool will tell you that it cannot be done, and that any attempt to do it will ultimately fail. But the consequences of this hubris will scale from broken families and broken people to monumental injustice. A mighty tempest will blow.

Meantime, butterflies are flapping their wings everywhere, with consequences we cannot calculate, and we may never know. We, too, swing our arms, and take to our feet with purpose, never knowing what will come of it. Yesterday, some of us took a long walk to draw a line of connection, to find one strand of causation, among the tangle.

From the policies of border injustice, from the bridge across the river in the borderlands of El Paso-Juárez, to a military camp with children in soft sided tents on the deserts of West Texas, we walked. We spoke. We wept.

We sent another ripple into the universe, and we intend to send more.

Photograph by Allan Mestel