Posts
12/5/22
We turn a corner, and fragments of remembered images that I didn’t know I had open an abyss, and it feels like I am on its edge, about to fall. Crosses like shrubs planted in front of a sign placed diagonally on the corner. Robb Elementary. We have come to Uvalde, where half a divided town wants to remember, to never let go of their slaughtered children and teachers, and others want it to go away. A star-crossed town, close enough to the border between the US and Mexico that it teems with immigration police, the border patrol, the Texas Rangers.
12/5/22
It's difficult to share this day we spent in Uvalde on the Journey for Justice. It was a heartbreaking, emotional day visiting the tributes at the school and park. The photos and faded flowers and momentos reduced me to tears. When will life be valued over the right to own such lethal toys. When will the lives of all children be valued equally. Several family members bravely spoke of their pain and resolve to change the laws. I know that I can't come close to imagining their pain.
12/4/22
This misty morning #Journey4Justice2022 met on the muddy banks of the Rio Grande in Laredo/Nuevo Laredo. Part of our agenda for the morning was to honor a man who was shot by CBP agents while picnicking with his daughter on the Mexican side of the river….Guillermo Arévalo Pedraza was killed in Nuevo Laredo in 2012. Say his name - Guillermo Arévalo Pedraza. #BorderJustice #Journey4Justice2022
12/2/22
This morning a few of us took the familiar walk across the international bridge to Matamoros, where once an encampment had grown along the banks of the river. It had undergone a growth spurt when the US adopted a policy known as Remain in Mexico, an attempt to discourage asylum seekers by exposing them to the raw danger of the border city that our State Department did then—and still does—classify as one of the most crime ridden places on the planet.
12/2/22
Each of us comes to this Journey for Justice with their own story. The story of what we see along the way is too big for any one person to tell. For each of us, it will take an effort to make sense of what we are looking at, and a special effort to tell the stories of what we see.
Each of our stories is like a strand. The story of our Journey is like a strand, spun to become warp and weft of our testimony. Each attempt to tell the story is an attempt at making sense, to ourselves and others, of what we see.
11/30/22
In only a matter of hours now, we will begin to arrive in Brownsville, Texas, making our way from every part of the country, to begin the Journey for Justice, from the Gulf of Mexico to the great Pacific. For some of us, it will be a reunion. For all of us, it will be a time to give our bodies over to our hearts and eyes. We have long been constrained by a world slowed by the pandemic, watching great waves of reaction and fear fortify the conviction that any recognition of the right of humans to pick up and move in this shared world is somehow a threat.
11/18/22
Nothing divides us the way the wall does.
I am not saying that the wall does a good job of stopping people from migrating, from places of despair to places of hope. It is, in fact, well established that migration cannot be stopped. People can be made to suffer, and are made to suffer and die. The wall is a small element in a scattershot of the weapons of deterrence that are doomed to failure. Failure because migration, people in motion, is as right—as unstoppable—as the rain.
11/11/22
In 20 days or so…a group of people from all over the country will convene, having dusted off their shoes and packed their bags for a trip to the southern border. Well, not just TO the border. A trip along the whole damn border. From the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, with lots of stops in between….
We call it the Journey for Justice. Or el Peregrinaje por la Justicia.
Join us. There is still time.
10/31/22
A wall of boxcars.
Such an age we live in! It finds us wondering if things are worse than ever before. Or does it just feel that way?
… On our border pilgrimage, the Journey for Justice, we know some of what we will find. We know, because we have been speaking to people in the borderlands. They tell us of their utter exhaustion, facing defeat after defeat in their struggles to defend the right of migration, with the clamor of hatred all around them.
10/19/22
It would take a kind of generosity that humans do not seem to have in abundance to tear down the barriers we have built and continue building to protect what some small numbers of us do have in abundance….The crisis, driven in part by what are known to some of us as “root causes,” the economic exploitation of weaker peoples by stronger ones, combined with changes in the weather and oceans that will drive many from their homes, would be better addressed by cooperation than by retrenchment, but that truth is hidden behind fear.
The southern border, with its bollards and razor wire and assault weapons, is the visible face of that fear.
10/14/22
Venezuelans, driven from their homes by poverty and hunger and drawn by the possibility of a better life in the United States, have been making their way, along with others from other countries similarly afflicted, up along the spine of Central America. They pass through the Darién Gap, a strip of jungle that lies along the way. We are told, by reporters who have made the trip with the families that brave this harrowing place, that most of them, some of them sick, with bones broken and feet blistered, would never do it again.
9/28/22
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.
Join us for the Journey for Justice, Dec. 2 - 18: https://bit.ly/JourneyJForm.
8/19/22
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.
