Are you getting it now, Conservative American friends?
Are you understanding them any better?
Are you connecting the dots at all between you both?
Can you see the lengths decent human beings will go to in order to protect the people they love: when threat comes, when terror overtakes them, when unprecedented crisis visits?
For the past couple of years, I’ve listened to you pile scorn upon migrants and refugees and undocumented people: for breaching borders, concealing themselves in freight cars, carrying their children through sun-scorched desert, climbing into homemade rafts and braving fierce oceans, for living hidden in plain sight.
I’ve heard your endless waves of sanctimony and self-righteousness; the way you wagged your fingers, turned up your noses, and sermonized with great indignation about their lawlessness and recklessness—certain you’d never resort to such measures, so sure you were morally superior.
It was easy to judge them from where you sat well-cradled in comfort. From that soft, insulated place of ease and security, you couldn’t imagine finding yourself standing where they have been standing for much of their lives: that place where fear is your default setting, where chaos is your daily bread, where survival becomes your only driver.
Look at you:
It’s only been a couple of weeks of relative inconvenience, and I’ve watched you coming undone: fighting with strangers in an attempt to store up a year’s worth of toilet paper and bottled water, hyperventilating as the impact of the loss of income begins to register, posting social media tirades about the scarcity and isolation you feel overwhelmed by.
Fear is hell, isn’t it? Desperation makes you do things you never thought yourself capable of, doesn’t it? You can begin to sink beneath the weight of the fears of the unknown and the urgency you’re immersed in and the swirling tumult of questions—and you just want to be safe, you just want to shield the people you love, you just want to live.
This is after just one weekend.
Play this movie out:
Can you imagine if this drags on for months or years, if supplies become more scarce, if your money runs out, if greater numbers die, if you can’t run out to a store three minutes away and overbuy whatever you want, if your options begin to dwindle? What might you be capable of doing then? Just how far could you imagine yourself going?
What happens if the stores run out of essentials for good?
What if you run out of money to stockpile them?
What if your neighbors stop sharing with you?
What if the government won’t help you?
What if a nearby nation was the only place that felt safe?
What might you do then?
And if you can imagine yourself doing something desperate, something that would be unthinkable to your current self—then imagine someone else, with no such worries and no such fears, receiving you, not with empathy but disdain.
Imagine them piling scorn about you and questioning your morality, your parenting, your intentions.
Imagine people with the wherewithal to help you—giving you a middle finger rejection and turning you away.
I wonder, as you empty shelves and fight with strangers, and as you push back the encroaching terrors, if you’ve generated any empathy for people who cross a border or scale a wall or conceal their identities—because they’ve felt that kind of desperation every damn second of every waking day for as long as they can remember.
Maybe it’s really easy in abundance to judge those in life-threatening lack.
Maybe in the privilege of opulence it’s difficult to imagine true poverty.
Maybe only after you feel yourself fully submerged in the flood of fear, can you understand what people will do, not to drown.
I hope compassion is rising up in you in these days, that understanding is taking hold in your heart, and that you are realizing the truth: that every human being is trying to survive—and we should help one another, whenever we can, because we’re all a hair’s breadth from the edge.
