I was sickened tonight, listening to the stories of the many people living in my home state of North Carolina, who refuse to evacuate areas threatened by Hurricane Florence; not because they don’t believe there is a danger or because they aren’t terrified or because they imagine themselves indestructible—but because they fear entering a public shelter makes them vulnerable to ICE.
These men and women, teenagers, seniors, and children have spent the past two years watching the agency become fully and violently weaponized in the hands of a predatory President, who knows that being Don Quixote and making windmills out of immigrants plays well to a caucasian base weaned on irrational fear of non-white people.
This is where we are now: people of color would rather face the fury of a natural disaster than the cruelty of our Government, and I don’t blame them. They have good reason. The body of work is expansive.
The hundreds of migrant children still separated from their families, the thousands of people who died in Puerto Rico, and the transfer of ten million dollars from FEMA to ICE this week, all crystallize this Administration’s commitment to cause trauma for people of color, not protect them from it—and it’s a flat-out human rights disgrace.
This isn’t the America our forebears made their way to (if they came on their own accord, that is), braving sea and sickness and death.
This isn’t the America etched at the feet of Lady Liberty, about the welcoming arms to a disparate multitude seeking refuge.
This isn’t safe harbor in a tempest world.
This is quickly becoming a gated community of terrified white people who believe the good fortune they’ve had of being born here, is some kind of moral achievement or divinely appointed birthright.
We should weep that we have so many people here who would rather brave a Hurricane than rely on those in power here to treat them with dignity, in the times when they are most vulnerable. We should grieve that marginalized people who were not born here are finding as much marginalization here, as wherever they fled.
And before you want to post some nonsense here about people like me wanting open borders or no accountability, save it. That’s a lazy, tired, fake news story about the Left, run in heavy rotation by a President who knows his base is short on critical thinking and addicted to parroting and retweeting every irresponsible word that leaves his sneering lips—as long as it continues the narrative of their supremacy and oppression.
Progressives and Liberals believe we can have laws and systems and safeguards, but we can also have compassion and respect for humanity under duress, striving to have a deep commitment to doing no harm.
Right now, we don’t have that.
Right now, we have an Administration that is the storm to millions of people, not the shelter in it.
We have a President who manufactures suffering instead of seeking to alleviate it.
Right now, we only have a party whose sole priority is white fear: creating it, leveraging it, perpetuating it, legislating it.
That’s not a country we want our children to inherit.
We need to regain our collective soul here, so that we become exhausted, tired, threatened people’s greatest safety—not their greatest danger.
