8/19/22

By Josh Rubin

What can I do?

For several years now, since I first realized that I didn’t know the answer, people, having learned what our policies are toward people who migrate toward our country, ask me this question. And I am at a loss for an answer. I did not know when I parked an RV in a parking lot at the entrance to the port of entry at Tornillo, Texas, where thousands of children were kept from their families, in tents, as the temperatures went from too hot days to cold mornings. All in the shadow of a wall that stretched as far as the eye could see.

All I can say, all I have found to say, is that we should make sure that somebody sees these children, and that these people who travel toward the North Star need to be seen. That we can never let them become the vanished, the disappeared. That we honor them by witnessing them. And by witnessing at not only the margins of national territory but the margins of humanity. And that we see, not just them, but ourselves, by standing on those margins.

The border, following river and mountain and desert, is a line sketched by history and gouged deep by greed and fear, fed by demagogues. We are calling our pilgrimage along the southern border of our country a Journey for Justice. We will line up a motley bunch of cars and people, and we will trace the line that is drawn ever darker with each passing political age. We will follow the line of injustice from sea to sea.

And we will see faces, looking across, and they will see ours. I don’t know what to do. But I know what we cannot do: look away.

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