9/28/22
By Josh Rubin
You draw a line. When you cross that line the rules, the simple rules, change. Here’s a rule: children need their parents, their families, and they should be together. But the line says that adults can be expelled, but children can stay, and be put in places, like military bases, while they are “processed.” So the folks who care about these children, in desperation, send them across that line. The one that changes the rules.
And on those military bases, the children suffer. And in encampments the families weep, and wait for the simple rules of kindness to kick in. Because of the line you drew. The one that changes the rules.
Here’s another: if you can’t survive where you are, if your existence is unbearable, you can go and find another place to live. But the line changes that. It changes the rule to exclude certain people who are kept out by gates and guns and walls. And the line is expert at seeing the difference between those to whom the line is just a line you can step cross and those for whom crossing the line risks life and limb. Suffice it to say that the guardians of the line see color.
Every day at places along the line, there are other lines. Lines of people waiting to cross. People with bits of paper clutched in their hands. Watch them as they show those scraps of identity to the armed guards, the ones who routinely decide their fate. Lines of hope challenging the currents of the river. Lines of sodden people waiting along bollard walls for green and white SUVs to show up, to determine, applying the rules of the line, rules written by the features of their faces, their ages, and the vagaries of international relations, whether they will soon go back across that line, waiting for those demonic St. Peters in uniform to rule them sheep or goats, and shepherd them to despair or hope, and still more trauma.
That’s the line we, Witnesses at the Border, will travel. The line that changes all the rules.
Journey for Justice/Peregrinaje por la Justicia
Dec. 2-18
Join us: https://bit.ly/JourneyJForm.