5/22/22

By Lee Goodman

There is an odd quality to waiting for nothing to happen.
I think of the patrolling wildlife warden, not expecting to encounter a wounded animal or a poacher but anticipating that it might happen Or the prison sentry, on guard in a tower, looking over the same yard as every other day, imagining a more dramatic scenario. Or the high school lunchroom monitor.
We don't expect the border to be flung open tomorrow. A judge said it can't be. The border guards will show up for a day of work that is like every other day for the past two years, in which their main job is to make sure no one gets in and nothing unusual happens.
But what if it does? What if hundreds or thousands of migrants from points across the globe - all those who have been trapped in Mexico - advance on the border crossing? What if they decide that their wait has become unbearable? What if they resolve to make a political statement by putting their bodies literally on the line, the man-made line that separates them from us? What if they act with solidarity, or what if some individuals, having reached their own personal breaking point, make a run for it?
What if some conscience-stricken border guard puts down his gun and joins hands with the people he has been staring down, the way it happens in movies? What if a mass of U.S. citizens shows up and demands justice for the people their tax dollars have been spent to oppress?
At every point in history, there was an alternative scenario that might have happened. Ordinary Germans might have pushed to get aboard the trains to keep Jews from being sent to their deaths at concentration camps. National Guardsmen might have refused to shoot to kill.
Tomorrow, in all likelihood, there will be no exciting anomalous action. Instead, it will be just another quiet day at the border, which will be a crushing disappointment to so many on both sides. The date was set for something to happen, but it almost certainly will not. So we will be there to see that momentous nothing, so that people will know of it, and so that the people who are responsible will know that they were witnessed doing nothing. Perhaps they will reflect upon the impact that the horrible nothing will have on people whose very lives depend upon the something that will still not be.
Or maybe, unexpectedly, something spectacular and wonderful will happen. We'll be there for that, too. #WitnessAtTheBorder #OpenEveryDoor