8/29/21

By Josh Rubin

You probably have not seen the people, from Haiti, and from the devastated countries in Central America, people who have pushed across the border into southern Mexico, who are being met by soldiers with clear shields, using those shields to drive people back. To knock people down. Families and children, ragged from their time held outside Mexico’s southern border, desperately forcing their way against these armed men, clutching at a chance to follow their North Star, which just so happens to be the North Star itself.

We get a chance to learn, if we read the text that goes with the posts that show video of these confrontations, that Orwellian language is not only spoken in English. As we heard at our own southern border, we can say things like protection protocols while we practice persecution. The Mexican government can speak of their duty to protect asylum seekers as we watch them pushed to the ground, children in arms. Violence done to language, as well as to people. How many will hear it?

People who most of us will never see. Mexico is charged with keeping as many as possible from reaching the US. And if they do reach, how many will see them, see their faces, hear their pleas for mercy? Who will brave the border towns where criminals feed on the displaced poor? The fetid camps that our own government has ordered dispersed by Mexico.

Dispersed to where? And who will see them? Who will hear them?