MAD AS HELL - WHAT AM I GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

10/12/2015

Last week at a Social Justice class at the University of Portland, a local Roman Catholic college, a student asked me, "How do you deal with your anger over injustice?" I thought for a moment and said that I try to channel my anger into action - to take my passion and put it into making change.

It is Sunday morning and I am reading the Sunday New York Times. The lead article in The Week in Review is by Sonia Nazario focuses on how the United States is paying Mexico to stop the movement of Central American children and their families at the Mexican southern border with Guatemala. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-refugees-at-our-door.html?ref=americas&_r=0

It is an incredible story - painful to read and to realize that once again my government is denying people with legitimate claims to asylum the opportunity to be heard and to enter the United States where their legal claims can be made. I stand up, go over to the kitchen sink and yell at the top of my lungs, IT IS NOT FAIR, IT IS WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!!!

So you told this student last week to "channel anger into action." What is the action that you can take? Suddenly the words of Oliver Mtukudzi's song WHAT SHALL WE DO echo in my mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfdI-Nw0kkM. This famous Zimbabwean singer wrote this song about African people dying of AIDS - it is a haunting tune that keeps asking, What shall we do?

I don't know what you will do to take action and to change the illegal, immoral actions towards refugees fleeing violence. My friend Rev. Randy Mayer wrote a powerful editorial to members of the U.S. Congress about Operation Streamline. http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/civil-rights/256415-stop-operation-streamline.

TAKE ACTION - DO SOMETHING WITH YOUR ANGER!

Today I am writing this blog to urge every person who reads my blog to take action - write an op ed piece, email or call your member of Congress to vote against Operation Streamline funding, volunteer with local immigrant justice groups. As of November 1 I will be back in Tucson, Arizona working with the various humanitarian aid groups to provide support for people caught up in the broken immigration system and writing about it. Anger can be good - especially righteous anger that lifts us out of our every day routine and gets us motivated to change unjust systems. Go for it - take action and take heart from Oliver's Song - What can we do?

2 Comments

Randall Shea

10/13/2015 03:47:06 pm

Thank you for this blog posting, Pat, and for all the good work you do. I read both the NY Times article and the Rev Randy Mayer editorial;both are well-done.

Deborah Sposito link

10/15/2015 03:01:20 pm

Thanks for bringing our attention to this human rights crisis in your blog and the call to action! Sonia Nazario illustrates the horrific human rights abuses on both sides of the border. The methods and authors may be different but the people, young and old are paying with their lives for simply being born outside of privilege. Describing how institutional oppression and racism lock out African-Americans in the U.S. both historically and currently, Ta-Nehisi Coates journalist and author of Between the World and Me, which was written to his son, asserts that the US is "...a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.” Here in the US, we have no choice but to face the interventionist, militaristic and bloody hands of US foreign policy during the Cold War in Central America. Just as we have no choice but to face the internal policies in the US since conquest and slavery. Today in Latin America and the US, we are witnessing the destructive and powerful legacy of US backed coups, assassinations and dictatorships. In the last century, privileged and corrupt US officials joined their counterparts in the oligarchy of Latin America thus mandating almost all of the public, those who disagreed, those who were the children of the ones who disagreed and those on the side of the people to the gas chambers. Coates underscores, “It does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black—what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable.” People are fleeing their homes because their bodies and their lives are being taken and broken.
Unlike Sonia Nazario and a handful of others, why are so few people in the U.S. either through daily conversation or media commentary making the connection between the refugees that are here and arriving daily from close by and the Syrian refugee crisis? Few Syrians have arrived in Portland, Oregon to seek services from aid agencies. Several colleagues who work for refugee and immigrant nonprofits shared they have been disappointed by the outpouring of support for Syrians as the media coverage of their flight captivated US residents. Of course, they are grateful for the compassion from the public but they ask why these same people do not come out for child and adult refugees escaping violence in Mexico and Central America?
Resources to take action: Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Sonia Nazario is an excellent source of information and her twitter feed links to immigration reform petitions, https://twitter.com/SLNazario/status/654616240305098752. Read her piece called Enrique's Journey, http://www.enriquesjourney.com/about-sonia/bio-2/. Another place to do online activism is through the Not One More Deportation website, http://www.notonemoredeportation.com/.
Big picture: We need to be doing long term coalition work supporting and linking the Black Lives Matter movement and the campaign against the school-to-prison pipeline and the prison & detention center industrial complex with the propaganda and human rights abuses aimed at refugees and immigrants. See http://blacklivesmatter.com/.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the world and me. Spiegel & Grau, New York, 2015. (17-18)

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