Children in cages watching fireworks

It’s the fourth of July. Usually a day to relax a bit, watch fireworks, and celebrate the ideals my nation was founded on. This year, celebrating feels hollow. I saw this cartoon making the rounds of my Facebook feed that pretty well sums it up: a child in a cage with fireworks in the distance. I can’t celebrate the day the American colonies made the powerful decision to DO something to preserve their liberty, when today we are the nation actually putting people in cages. We are a nation of immigrants, and yet this fear of the newcomer, especially the newcomer taking “our” resources, has been a part of our psyche for almost as long as we’ve been a nation. My friends and I did a ritual to pray for the Ancestors to remind us that we all made room for ourselves here at some point; for the Land Spirits to share their abundance with all of us, because there really is enough to go around; for Liberty, Justice, Wisdom, and Democracy to show us the way to accept refugees instead of caging them. They aren’t criminals, they’re refugees. Plus, they’re the ones brave and determined enough to leave everyone they know, take a harrowing trip of hundreds of miles, and risk getting stuck in a cage or having their children taken away at the end, just to get out of the life they’re living. FDR’s address on the 50th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty puts it this way:

It has not been sufficiently emphasized in the teaching of our history that the overwhelming majority of those who came from the Nations of the Old World to our American shores were not the laggards, not the timorous, not the failures. They were men and women who had the supreme courage to strike out for themselves, to abandon language and relatives, to start at the bottom without influence, without money and without knowledge of life in a very young civilization. We can say for all America what the Californians say of the Forty-Niners: “The cowards never started and the weak died by the way.”

There’s some allowance we should make for luck, but the people who make it here tend to have the kind of grit, and luck, we say we want in our population. Plus, caging people and taking their children is only going to make things worse when we go to unwind this policy.

Think about it: if you decided life sucked here so much you were really going to move to Canada (like so many of us say we will when we’re depressed about the state of things), what would you do? Let’s even give you a head start and say you knew somebody there who said “sure, come on up, I know some places are hiring, I’ll introduce you around”? Only first you have to get across the border, and when you get there they tell you to go here and start the paperwork, your kids can wait for you in this room… and then you discover that after the paperwork you are taken to a room full of people like you, the door locks behind you, and you have no idea what’s happened to your children? You stay stuck in this room for months or years, not enough of anything, guards intimidating and laughing at you, still no idea where your children are or if they’re okay…? After that kind of experience, would you have any trust at all left for the people coming in to say “we’re sorry for keeping you so long, you can go now, we’ll process your application, come back in 3 weeks for your hearing”? Would you ever let anyone in a position of authority lay hands on you again?

Are we not breeding the very extremists we’re so afraid of, by inflicting trauma on top of the trauma that caused people to leave home in the first place? And what of the children, spending those same months or years with only other lost children and guards for company? What are we teaching them about how the world works? What will we get when we release a bunch of children who have been socialized to understand that adults in this country will lock them up and hurt them?

“Liberty and justice for all” isn’t just a nice slogan. It’s also the way we get people to trust us and stay within the systems we set up. If the first thing you learn is that “the system” is out to get you just for setting foot across the border, you’re going to spend the rest of your time learning how to thwart “the system”, just in self-defense.

I understand that people who are already here aren’t necessarily living the lives they want. I understand that it’s no more fair, nor true, to say to such people, “it’s because you didn’t work hard enough” than it is to say “it’s because of the immigrants taking your (job/welfare/whatever)”. It’s very human to scapegoat the new guy, the stranger, someone you’ve made no human connection with and can therefore more easily see as the terrible Other. But I’m also minded of old Irish hospitality culture, in which one is expected to give the traveler all the temporary support he needs, partly because it’s temporary, partly because you might find yourself needing a night’s refuge and a hot meal from some other stranger in the future.

We all have a choice how to respond to the circumstances of our lives. May Liberty give us the strength and grace to receive the newcomer as a potential friend and asset to our community. May She remind us that we gain much for ourselves by being kind to others.