6/21/20

By Josh Rubin

Still hiding from the pandemic, we watch deportation flights, venture timidly out to the streets, some of us, to join in the uprising against systemic racism. My weather app still sounds alerts every time there are storms encroaching on Brownsville, Texas, a few steps across the bridge over the bloody Rio Grande, on the opposite bank, where those storms pour rain onto the clay-rich mud and flood the tents of the people we left behind, in a ragged, fenced camp in Matamoros, Mexico.

The helplessness I feel is only a faint echo of the despair these asylum seekers must struggle with every day, but especially on those days, frequent during this season, when the heavens open and the rain comes. I don’t know what these people, mothers and fathers and children must say to themselves to get through one of those days, when my weather app announces dangerous lightning and rain and mud.

As the year goes on, what must be the worst year they have ever known, I imagine them, the pictures that will never leave my mind, from the days we held our vigil there. Part of me is still there. But I am safe here, high and dry, and wearing a mask every time I go out.

And, I imagine, many in my circumstances are, like me, half holding our breath and setting our hearts on the election that will remove the hateful scourge from power. Those same hearts that cannot quite leave the banks of the river.