What Are We Doing?

Today at her daily press briefing (lol) Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the cruel separation of parents from children by saying “It is biblical to follow laws.”

Two things.

1. No it isn’t.

2. It’s not the law to steal children from their asylum seeking parents and stuff them in prison camps.

The Bible can be vague on certain things. Jesus speaks in lots of parables and word games, but on this, Jesus is explicit and clear:

Matthew 25:35

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed meFor I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

Luke 10:27

“And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

The Hebrew Scripture (Old Testament) is even more explicit:

"So you too should love the resident alien, for that is what you were in the land of Egypt." Deuteronomy 10:19

Furthermore,  it is explicitly not biblical to follow unjust laws, or to hide behind law as a smokescreen for other heinous actions. See: the healing of the man on the sabbath (Mark 3:1-6) and the exceedingly specific woes upon the Pharisees (Luke 11:37-54, Matt 23:1-39).

My point, here, however, is not to argue with the twisted fundamentalist distortion of the Christian scriptures. 

My point here is to ask:

What are we doing?

Kids—eight month old babies, being ripped away from their parents, separated from their siblings, and thrown into an old abandoned Walmart, shuffled past a mural of Donald Trump with a vaguely ominous and nonsensical slogans and given strictly enforced times to run around, eating in mess halls that look like prison cafeterias.

Children  have been “taken “by Border Patrol agents who said they were going to give them a bath. As the hours passed, it dawned on the mothers the kids were not coming back.””

I’ve been blogging into the wind long enough to have no illusions that this will be read by more than six people, but what else can I do? I sit here and I see what is happening and I am at turns terrified and furious. This is systematic oppression of a minority. It is a cruelty explicitly instated at the federal level that is unprecedented in the modern era.

I see people constantly say “This is not who we are.”

But isn’t it?

Isn’t this exactly who we are and who we have been for years? 

I know that we’ve been keeping immigrants, including children, locked up in detention centers on the border for years. Not too long ago, I spent an evening flooding my congressman’s Facebook page with images of ICE detention centers, trying in vain to get the racist entitled old white man to back a humane immigration system.

This is a country of racism—institutionally and culturally. We throw black kids and black men into jails over minor offenses, and leave them there for the rest of their lives. Around 13% of the population of the United States  is African American. They make up 35% of jail inmates and 37% of prison inmates. Back in 2009, almost a full 5% of all African American adult males were incarcerated.

And this is what we do to kids on the border, just because they’re brown.

Donald Trump and his Republican Party continue to criminalize all non-white Christians. They’ve banned Muslims from coming into the country, made social media checks a standard practice, want to crack down on minor drug offenses that inordinately impact black men, they scapegoat Mexicans as murderers and gang members. “Animals,” they say, then get defensive and clarify they’re just talking about MS-13, even though everyone knows they only use MS-13 to mask their virulent racism. In defense of the White Supremacist killing of a protestor, Donald Trump said there were “Good people on both sides.”

There was a time it almost seemed like we were getting better, right? But the sheer hate for a black man being in charge caused the racist underbelly of this nation to erupt and claw its way into the mainstream of American society.

He was born in Kenya.

He’s a Muslim who wants to overtake the nation and throw it into Sharia law.

They cloak their hate in Christ and St. Paul. They dare us to “defy” the leader at our peril. They want to put in place a Theocratic Authoritarian state wherein their conception of Christianity (one that defies all calls toward mercy, service and preferential treatment of the poor) is the law of the land. Where being an immigrant is a crime, where to be Muslim is to be second class, where being black defines you as less worthy of decency and respect.

Listen, I am Catholic. I am not against your faith being an important part of your political life, and informing your views. 

But this is not the same thing. 

Jesus lays it out clearly for us:

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

We are meant to support the broken and battered and beaten. We are meant to share our wealth with the poor, to literally share our table with the outcast.

We dance around these threats of authoritarianism and say “it can never happen here,” but it has happened and continues to happen before our eyes as we sit and watch children ripped away from their mothers at the border. Mothers escaping violence, fearing for their lives, who come to this country because we have told the world: You are welcome here.

The Trump administration is doing damage to a lot of things. It is ostracizing us from our global allies, throwing money away at corporations, flirting with authoritarians abroad.

As a nation, we can come back from economic downturns. You can fix broken international trade relationships.

What is much harder to come back from is this moral rot at the center of this country, the one we have ignored for over 250 years, that has returned to remind us that we are a nation of delusion. 

We are fed American exceptionalism. We are fed the lie that we are the “Greatest country in the World.”

All as we imprison black men at alarming rates. As we lock up children on the border. As we penalize the poor and rip healthcare away from the sick. As they cloak it in lies and twist their religious texts into justification for their cruelty and their greed.

This country is battered and bruised and sick and we all sit here on our phones and our computers. We balk and laugh at the antics of a foolish, racist man and his cronies of racists, oligarchs, and authoritarians. We have ignored the clear signs of a broken political life, content to assume that others will vote for the right person, or lying to ourselves that “all politicians are the same.” These things don’t affect me. They won’t be as bad as everyone says.

What are we doing when we sit and see the horror of broken families, broken because we fed them a lie, and we do nothing? 

What will it take for the dam to burst, for things to be so morally repugnant and unacceptable that we are shaken from our apathy? What will it take me to do more than sit here and type words into the void? 

We are at a moral tipping point. This is beyond politics as we have ever known it in this country. This is egregiously abnormal, and we are lied to at every turn and told we are overreacting. This is beyond political parties and even religious vs. nonreligious. How do we come back from accepting, as a society, forcing severe trauma upon innocent children? All to benefit the engines of war and oppression? 

This is not even the worst of it. Literal camps are coming, “tent cities” built by our government to house kids stolen from their parents. Tent cities in the triple digit summer Texas heat. We'll find euphemisms to avoid calling these encampments what they are. We've seen it before. 

I have no answers. We have sat by and allowed a federal police force to round up and detain immigrants with no due process in inhumane conditions for years.  We have let this fester because it is easier not to think about. Are we too late? 

You can call your representatives—but banking on a Republican politician to care about institutionalizing racism is like asking a tiger to change its stripes. It just does not happen. But what else is there for us to do? 

We can vote -- and the only moral vote to put an end to these deeply racist, deeply dangerous, and deeply immoral policies is one to remove every Trump sycophant and enabler in Congress.

But these heinous attitudes do not end whenever Trump and his kind are out of politics. They are a part of the American fabric. Is there any coming back? Is there redemption for the American soul?

What are we doing?

What are we doing?

My Letter From the President

It was a cold night in a cold, empty room. Like many nights in my first year of college, I was by myself in my single room. I was very sick, and though I didn't know it at the time, about to get a whole lot sicker.

But tonight--this night--felt warm. I had voted in my first election, and I had voted for the first African American President. I was excited--and scared. I felt that this was an election that mattered, because it was about change, even though  plenty of people said that this kind of promise was dumb and naive. Barack Obama had no platform, they said, he just threw around nice words and made promises he couldn't keep.

But I heard plenty that was completely different than what came before. It was a call for diversity and inclusion, a call to replace war with diplomacy, and to set aside mistrust of other races and religions. In his acceptance speech that night, this is what President Obama said:

It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference. 

It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.

We are, and always will be, the United States of America.
It's the answer that led those who've been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.

I am not, and wasn't then, stupid or naive enough to think every promise would come true, or that any change would be easy...but these are the words and the dreams that defined everything about who I strived to become. Though it is not until I sat down to write this that I truly understood.

Just as my adolescence was inextricably linked to the disastrous policies and presidency of George W Bush, my adulthood has been inextricably tied to the presidency of Barack Obama and the world view that America can be better than it is now-- that America is an unfinished project that calls upon each of us to commit to its deepest values of liberty, diversity, and inclusion.

I went into college in the midst of the earth rattling recession that turned the world on its axis. My prospects were dim. I saw the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq throw away people's lives and accomplish nothing. I saw anger at Muslims creep into our cultural consciousness. I saw a president ineptly out of touch with the needs of the country's people, ignorant of the disastrous economic policies he and his congress had put forth. I didn't fully grasp it all, but this was the milieu in which I grew up. The challenges felt insurmountable.

Crohn's was an enormous burden then; it felt like it separated me from everyone else. I often felt that my time in college was a waste since there was no way I would be able to  hold down a job with this illness. I didn't believe in much of a future for myself. And with the economy falling apart, and the television reporting that things had not been this bad since World War II, I had even less to look forward to. But my illness has also provided me with a unique perspective and empathy that has served me well and opened my eyes to realities of inequality. My own roadblocks and difficulties have kept me grounded enough to realize that there is nothing in this world that is promised, deserved, or guaranteed. Good person or bad.

When I awoke from my surgery in January of 2009, having just gotten three feet of my small intestine removed, I had the great privilege to spend the next two weeks with a cavalcade of temporary roommates who were admitted and released in a matter of days. There was the guy who suffered from such chronic diarrhea that the room smelled of feces at all times; he spent his entire two days shouting about all that had gone wrong in his life. To be fair, he did seem to have a severe issue, but also, I had just had my stomach cut open and couldn't move. There was another dude who was unhappy with our nurses for not reacting enough to his needs, who moaned and groaned constantly.

My favorite roommate, though, was a fellow who had been taken to the ER because, I think, he had complications with his diabetes. He spent this entire time explaining to people on the phone how horrible his ambulance ride was, that he didn't even want to come to this hospital, but he had to. Everything--from the food, to the great tribulation of receiving his prescriptions--was a personal slight against him. He demanded and deserved only the best and greatest attention at all times. Then he went on and on about how Obama was a sleeper agent for the Muslim Brotherhood, in the pocket of the Saudis, and was planning to overthrow the country.

So that was fun.

I was lying there, the thought slowly dawning on me how fortunate I had been to even be stuck in this bed. I had almost been set home, which may very well have cost me even this very uncomfortable moment.  It had only been a few days since my surgery, and I still had my catheter, I still had an IV inserted into my forearm, wires attached to various places to monitor my vitals, I still could not sit up, but I felt better than I had in years. I could not stop thanking God and the universe and every abstract concept of creation for this unbelievable feeling of... Nothing. I was not in the constant pain and exhaustion that had accompanied my every waking hour for so long. I resolved, then, that there would never be a moment that I would not give thanks, where I would not remember where I once was and never again take for granted the simple pleasure of waking up and not being in pain.

But those two weeks, I learned very quickly that those who did not know what it was like to not have everything at all times could not be thankful for what they did not realize was not there right. I realized that the hope I believed in and voted for, that I was experiencing vividly was virulently opposed by cynicism, selfishness, racism, and classism. Those who have and have always had do not feel for those who have not.

I left that hospital and it still took me a long time to reach my footing and come to grips with this grand epiphany, to even fully appreciate how deeply I felt it. But this healing came at the same time as this new presidency...and I was on fire with that three word mantra: Yes We Can.

I could live a life. I could pull myself together and overcome what had defined everything about who I was. Maybe I did get to have a future--something I never dreamed for myself.

And so I put myself out there. I went on a retreat that gave me the chance to turn the page on that previous chapter in my life--I literally saw those fears and doubts go up in flames. I took my first trip to West Virginia for a weeklong service immersion experience. This was mostly as an opportunity to meet other students and try to find my place in the world--but what I encountered was so much greater.

For the first time I stepped outside of the metropolitan area which was everything I knew. I spoke to people suffering--no, not suffering--enduring and overcoming poverty. I learned about the destructive practices of the coal industry on the environment, individual health, and the local economies. I was aware that the world was not a fair place--I knew that in my own life-- but I saw vividly for the first time the interconnected pattern that weaves every American individual to the other, how our broken societal compacts inordinately burden those who are already disadvantaged.

From then I devoted myself to service; I felt a responsibility to understand more about inequality, to be an advocate, and to help where I could. This culminated in my service with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, where this blog first began. I was propelled by the president's call to get involved in the world, I was propelled by the responsibility I felt to make the most of my second chance at health.

The Obama presidency coincided with a time in my life where I was, for the first time, getting the chance to discover and define who I was above and beyond a sick kid. It coincided with my first real experience of being healthy. I saw that progress was difficult and obstructed by hate and narrow mindedness, but I also knew that even the smallest victories were worth fighting for--and every day for the first 18 years of my life I had to find those kind of small victories amidst struggle. I had the chance to see a president who fought for those who struggled--who advocated for the poor and the immigrants, the gay and the sick. It inspired me to figure out how I could advocate for what is right--and it challenged me to go out and discover where I fit, how my life fit into the complex pattern of injustice. I faced the hard truths that though I have struggled in life in many ways, I am also gifted --undeservingly -- with many advantages. And with these advantages come responsibilities.

In 2010, the Affordable Care Act passed, guaranteeing coverage for pre-existing conditions and allowing dependents to stay on their parents' healthcare until the age of 26. As someone who lives with a chronic illness, both of these things were such a weight off my shoulder that I nearly came to tears on multiple occasions--when it passed, when it was challenged, and when it was affirmed. The 26 provision proved to be huge for me, given how hard it had been to find a job. And the fear that I could be denied coverage because I am a sick is a fear that has plagued me since I was a teenager. The relief I felt was like finding out I was in remission all over again.

In the early days of 2016, President Obama passed executive orders to increase gun safety measures. It was this, following yet another senseless attack, that inspired me to write to President Obama. I had never written any such letter, and I certainly did not expect the president to read it. I don't know why I wrote it; I guess it had begun to dawn on me that his term was ending and I wanted to say thanks, even if I was shouting into the wind.

I thanked him for his fight to curb gun violence--I told him that my parents were educators, and so was my fiancé--and the NRA and the GOP supposition that we should arm teachers to protect kids horrified and sickened me. I thanked him for working to make our country safer. I also let him know that while I admired so much of what he did, I was disappointed in many of his education policies.

I thanked him for the Affordable Care Act. I told him how much peace of mind it brought me, a young adult who had been without a job for nearly a year, a person who lived with a chronic illness for his whole life. I told him that this legislation was a weight off my shoulder that I did not even know I carried.

I told him that his message of hope and optimism helped inspire me to serve in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, where I encountered young men who deserved more opportunity, many of whom are the children of immigrants. I told him that I  appreciated his work to provide clemency for thousands of undocumented immigrants and opportunities for DREAMers. In Los Angeles, I also became keenly aware of the importance of representation in media, as I wrote about on this blog, and I recognized how much it meant for many of those students to see a president who liked like them in the office.

Months passed and I totally forgot I had sent that letter. And in September I received a FedEx envelope from the White House. I assumed it was a form letter. It was not.

This letter, maybe actually by Barack Obama, maybe not (I'll choose to believe it is) encapsulates so much about these last 8 years of my life. From that empty room in East Residence Hall on the night of my first election, to Casa Dorothy Kazel the night of Obama's second victory, sitting around the living room TV with my fellow Jesuit Volunteers, to now: months away from the future with the woman I love that I did not dare imagine that cold November night.

I'll hold this letter and treasure it for as long as I live; it is a message from a person that inspired me to dream beyond cynicism, to serve and to advocate, and who fought to provide me my right to be healthy.

For all that you have done for me and for this country: Thanks, Obama.