An article in the New
York Times for July 7, 2014, dealing with the “surge in unaccompanied
minors” across the southern borders of the United States, refers to a law
against human trafficking, overwhelmingly passed by both houses of the U. S.
Congress in 2008. The law is called, the
“William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of
2008.”
[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/us/immigrant-surge-rooted-in-law-to-curb-child-trafficking.html
Another NYT article presents another context for the “surge”
in fleeing towards the U. S. borders -- the epidemic of children being killed
by gang-generated violence in Central American countries.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/world/americas/fleeing-gangs-children-head-to-us-border.html?ref=us&_r=0]
The countries that are the focus of this – and most of the -- reporting are El
Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
Each article, each television commentary, each opinion piece
that I have read about this wave of sorrow, at one point or another, will creep
into a discussion on whether this phenomenon is a crisis of immigration or an
humanitarian crisis. My small mind is reduced to an even smaller space when I
am confronted with the pictures, the stories, the “noise” that is being
generated. My perennial question surfaces, “Who defines the terms by which we
live?” And I would speak that question
for the children. But our failure in our long-standing tradition of collective
denial has silenced that question throughout whatever it is that we call
American history. Who spoke for the
hundreds of thousands of children – children the same age as these suffering
migrant children – who were culled from the villages of Africa and harvested
for the centuries of transatlantic enslavement?
Who spoke for the children who ran – and Frederick Douglass was a
teenager when he ran – from the unutterable cruelty and abuse of domestic
slavery? Who spoke for the Mayan and
Aztec and Lakota and Algonquin and Shoshone and Mississippi and Seminole
children who crawled out of the woods to see their parents, grandparents and
siblings slaughtered by the purveyors of “Manifest Destiny”?
Who defines the terms by which we, by which they, live?
When U. S. military went into Central America years before
the Civil War; when much debate in Washington at one time focused on how to
invade Caribbean countries for the expansion of slavery; when drugs and guns
infested the inner cities; when gangs in Chicago and Detroit and Atlanta and
Los Angeles and Houston threaten the same generation of children on this side of
the border as are walking northward – then who is defining any term, in any
language, that would lift up the children and say, “We stand indicted by our
own hypocrisy.” Let not the judgement stand that we do not value the lives of children, anywhere. Not in
Nigeria, not in Bangladesh. Not in Chicago, not in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
In the Book of Deuteronomy, clear (and, perhaps, surprising) injunctions about tithing
are set down (Deut. 25:19 -- 26:15). Setting aside the first fruits of the
harvest, the Israelites were to distribute the produce among the Levites (the
priests of the temple); the aliens, the orphans and the widows, “so that they
may eat their fill within your towns.”
So that they may eat their fill within your towns. How radically apt is that commandment,
especially for the children who are hungry and frightened and orphaned and
abused and sexually assaulted all along their flight from home. Much of the
hunger is due to those who appropriated their land for the diets of the
industrialized north. Much of their fear of assault and death flows from the
behaviors of those who scramble in the dung heap of drugs that feed the
addictions of the civilized, prosperous nations in control of the resources of
the planet. Our children are aliens in
their own home land. Other children, even more brutalized, more abandoned to
the engines of death, are meeting them in this desert in which we wander.
Who defines the terms? And how do we live?
The sin about which the Israelites were warned by Moses was
of profound importance to all of us who are narcotized by denial. “Do not
forget.” Nowhere is it more clearly
articulated than in Exodus and Leviticus. It seems a compulsion of mine to
repeat these verses, over and over and over. It is the foundation stone for
every act of liberation that we can exercise:
“You shall not wrong a stranger or
oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not afflict
any widow or orphan. If you do afflict them, and they cry out to me, I will
surely hear their cry, and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword,
and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.” [Exodus 22:
21-24]
“When a stranger sojourns with you
in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you
shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself;
for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” [Leviticus
19:33]
The sin is to forget.
The sin that today infects so many of our souls, I think, is
to deny that we ever knew. But some of us are part of the unbroken story, the
unending song:
Of course, James Baldwin understood sin, and the price one
paid when one chooses denial. But he also speaks, prophesies about salvation:
Salvation is as real, as mighty,
and as impersonal as the rain, and it is yet as private as the rain in one’s
face. It is never accomplished; it is to
be reaffirmed every day and every hour. There is absolutely no salvation
without love: this is the wheel in the middle of the wheel. Salvation does not
divide. Salvation connects, so that one sees oneself in others and others in
oneself…It is a mighty fortress, even in the teeth of ruin or at the gates of
death. It protects one from nothing except one thing: one will never curse God
or man. [“To Crush a Serpent”, in James
Baldwin: The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall
Kenan, p.203]
We do not dare trample the children as if we and they are
not the same. We define the terms by which they live. Or do not live. And they
define us, when they stare at us and cry.
Joseph, thank you for this moving, provocative, and haunting piece. It is very much in line with the migratory trends I spent some time in Mexico this summer studying, but oh the spins you've put on it. Thank you
ReplyDeleteEspecially this: "Much of the hunger is due to those who appropriated their land for the diets of the industrialized north. Much of their fear of assault and death flows from the behaviors of those who scramble in the dung heap of drugs that feed the addictions of the civilized, prosperous nations in control of the resources of the planet. Our children are aliens in their own home land."
We forget that we're a part of it. We forget that it's happened before. We forget that if we don't recognize our part in it and do something about that, that it will happen again. These are the tragedies, indeed, the SINS of forgetting.
You've reminded us, however, as you tend to do, in poem, in loving presence, and in prose. Thank you! The children will indeed tell us who we really are.