5/27/20

By Josh Rubin

This social media space is not a place any of us come to enjoy ourselves. For many of us, it is a painful experience. Especially painful now, I think.

There is no good news. There is nothing to inspire anything but despair. And for those of us who are activists, who were able at one time to turn our feelings of outrage and sympathy into vigils and sign making and loud, righteous cries, we are constrained by conditions that threaten our own survival. Many of us are old enough to be seriously worried about contracting a disease that could shorten our longish lives.

And as I wait for the Covid weather to clear, I and others scour for news about pilgrims stranded at the border, in prisons, on infected flights to other prisons or to their benighted homelands. Brutal stories, heartbreaking stories that come like drumbeats or lashes of a whip. Why do we do this to ourselves and to each other?

Some days the answer is not so clear, but in our more lucid moments I think we see, as a burning, bright light the possibility of holding the perpetrators of this endless and outsized cruelty, holding them responsible. Putting them in glass booths and presenting them with the evidence of what they have done. And the story we will tell will tear down the walls built by their hatred.

Of course, I have doubts about what we can do. Certainty is not one of those qualities given me. So it seems to me that all of us are living stories to which we may never hear the end. So, I rise each day to witness. And I dream of bearing witness.

And once the pandemic wanes, whenever that happens, I will look directly at the faces that haunt me, no screens, my body once again my own, to stand with you and with the victims of oppression. Until then, we can meet here.