Posts
8/22/21
Barbarians at the gate. No, not outside the gate. Inside.
I suppose there are some folks reading this who live in gated developments. Maybe there is a guard who raises and lowers a bar depending on whether you are recognized. Maybe you have a combination of numbers that you punch into a keypad. Maybe you slide a card into a slot and the door lock clicks or rattles open for you.
8/19/21
If anyone has noticed that I have been quiet lately, my excuse is that I have been spending a few weeks in Mexico. I studied for two of those weeks, to make the Spanish I try to speak a little less awkward. And, of course, I spent my time in places very different from the place I live, and the places I usually inhabit.
I know many of you have gone to Mexico, and have seen some of the sights, heard some of the sounds, tasted and smelled the air of a different world than ours. It is a feeling of extremes. On the one hand, as always I am struck by the similarities that bind us, our daily struggle to keep body and soul together. To raise children. Food, shelter.
8/6/21
We have a tendency to apologize for migration. We try to point out that there is no great surge of humanity coming to the southern border. But why do we worry this point like a guilty dog with a bone?
There is no denying that there are a lot of desperate, often hungry, people trying to get into the United States. Why wouldn’t they? We are continuing a long-standing reaction to political persecution and brutal exploitation. And—this is important—we are only at the beginning of the most profound displacement in the history of humanity.
8/3/21
Practices like the rejection of people at our southern border, and the now resumed practice of loading families on planes to send them back to places from which they fled in fear or in desperation—practices like these rely on psychological and physical distance. Humans, in order to avoid empathy, rely on the avoidance of engagement, perhaps by never venturing near, or by taking care not to lock eyes with those whose eyes can disarm us with their terrifying hope and need.
8/2/21
Never Again/Nunca Más: Tribute to El Paso; 2nd Anniversary 2019 Massacre
Witness at the Border created this video to remember the victims of the August 3rd, 2019 Walmart Massacre.
7/25/21
I am in the south of Mexico, in a city not terribly far from the Guatemala border. The weather is cool, slightly chilly in the mornings until the sun comes up. This morning I linger in my room, loosening my fingers on my guitar, and sitting down to write this.
I spend so much of my time looking at the dysfunction of the world in my everyday life that I forget what wonder I feel at the miraculous way the human race works together. Usually, when I ponder this, I think of how many of us manage to get into cars and drive these tons of metallic death without incident, consciously cooperating enough to reach our destinations unhurt, alive and unimpressed. How the hell do we do it?
7/17/21
In Haddox Park, bordered on one side by fencing that surrounds all of Fort Bliss, people filter in to join a protest against the migrant child prison held inside, far from our sight.
We drove around yesterday, straight from the airport, to get a look at the cavernous tents where the children are lined up on low bunks like cordwood. We can see very little with our eyes, and must rely on reports that shock even our battle hardened souls.
7/15/21
On Saturday, Witness at the Border will join with others from across the country at the gates of Fort Bliss, to stand once again in protest of the tragic practice of imprisoning migrant children, this time on the largest military base in the country. We will raise our signs and our voices.
We will raise our eyes. We will once again bear witness to the moral failure of a policy toward people that denies them a human right. The right to migrate in order to survive. Whether they flee the ravages of climate change or the consequences of political and economic persecution, their right must be recognized and honored.
7/12/21
I was recently asked why it is that the United States has so much trouble getting its immigration policy right. It seemed to the questioner that we were failing, no matter what the party in charge.
It seems that way to me, too. Here we are, hoping for relief from a presidential term of extraordinary cruelty, and we find ourselves looking at policies that are still causing great suffering. Expulsion of people creating massive camps beneath our southern border, hungry and exposed. Children in tents huddled by their dusty bunks, losing track of who they are, and why they are alive.
Painting by Melissa Bowen Rubin
7/9/21
I cannot start at the beginning. It goes back too far, to the reasons people leave their homes, the things that drive them from their homes. Then they reach the border, where policies intensify their desperation. Policies like racist expulsion, and separation driven by cultural self-righteousness.
The result is children without adults who are judged to have committed a crime. Is the crime migration itself? Is the crime being alone? Unaccompanied?
7/7/21
Our enemy is legion. It wears a thousand masks, and must be unmasked a thousand times before we are done. That is why we witness.
Fort Bliss is an army base that holds a prison that wears the mask of a shelter. Its mask is flimsy, but it is held up with fences and guards and distance. It is kept out of sight. The children held there are never seen. All we can see are faraway tents.
