6/24/21

By Josh Rubin

We see things differently. So what we mean when we witness things can be very different depending on our perspectives. Some of us see the suffering of people at the border caused by the barriers we erect to our common humanity. Others see, so they tell us, an earnest attempt to right a ship that nearly capsized into a four year eruption of xenophobia.

We see the reports from inside places like the children’s holding tents at Fort Bliss, and we are flooded with sympathetic agony as our minds fill with pictures of such places, where we have stood, where we have forced ourselves to suffer to bring attention there. Others, we are told in official statements, defend what they are doing, with reassurances that, for instance, they are bringing in mental health professionals in great numbers to deal with the wishes of the children inside to end their own lives, driven by those conditions.

And the political theater. From the right, hysteria about brown people coming to hurt us. From the government, a quiet reassurance that they are not as bad as the other guy, and a puzzling insistence on keeping the same structures of tragedy in place, a disheartening commitment to stability over humanity.

And us. Where do we stand?

On the banks of the river, remembering the dead. At the gates of the prison, straining to hear voices calling out to us before they fall silent, before our hearing fails us. Our place is not in the halls of the powerful, but in the arroyos of the powerless and desperate, saying over and over again, look, please look. See what we see.