July 2018: Time To Be Alive
When I was in the sixth grade, I read a book called The Girl Who Owned A City. It was about a dystopian future in which children woke up and all the grown ups were gone. They had to create their own world, their own leaders. I loved the scary challenge of the book, perhaps because I knew the security of what it was to go home and know my parents would be there. My first year as a third grade teacher in the Bronx, I had to constantly come up with writing exercises and lesson plans in the desperate hope that I could capture the children's attention. And so it was that one day I told them to open their notebooks and write me a story about waking up to find that all of the grown ups were gone.
I had never seen the children become so agitated so quickly. Even the studious children who hunched over their notebooks had fear glinting in their eyes. The more bold children crossed their arms. One began kicking the chair of the child next to them, manufacturing a distraction from the small emotional storm I had caused. I was twenty two and clouded with my own privilege. What to me was an exercise in imagination - no parents! no teachers! - was to them a short fuse to their own terror. It was within the realm of reality that a grown up could leave them, someone could die, someone could be deported, a home could be lost, a cousin suddenly gone, a life snuffed out, a mother snatched away to the place they'd worked so hard to leave.
For the last few weeks I've been thinking of that moment in that classroom, wishing I could go back and undo my words, remove the splinter of fear from their thoughts and hearts. Security is an emotional birthright. To be torn from your parents, and for parents to have children kidnapped from them, is a trauma that reaches the soul. On the radio this morning, a woman from Grassroots Leadership read letters from detained mothers who had their children taken from them at the border. They had not heard their child's voice in over 21 days. Women were fainting from the stress of it. This was nothing to say of the audio of the screaming children, the photos of them in cages. There is such a spectacular lack of humanity in what is happening that I sometimes go numb for days. I answer emails and I buy groceries and I ask myself in a small, small voice when I'll find the resolve to engage again. It's ego that says we're only effective if we're on the front lines, if we're loud and bold and rich. It's easy cynicism to skip the phone call to a senator by thinking, everyone else is calling, or, what could my call possibly do. And it's a privilege within itself to think action only necessary when the action has a clear result. My spiritual condition doesn't rely on the praise I get when I do the right thing. It's a condition made from the mere fact of doing the right thing, over and over again, when no one is watching, when everyone is watching.
I've been trying to view what's happening through the lens of America's origin story: a country founded on theft of land and genocide and enslavement of others. It is not a surprise to be lead here, to this dark spot, this reckoning. And I keep thinking of the phrase of wonderment, What A Time To Be Alive, applied instead to this moment: this is my time to be alive. I'm here at this moment to make the phone calls and have the uncomfortable conversations with other white people about whiteness. I'm here to show up at the marches when I can and amplify the voices of those who have been doing social justice work for decades and decades beyond my own awareness. My engagement with America in this dire moment is imperfect - there will be days that I can take the action, and there will be days where I go through the motions of attending to my own needs. There will be days I go to sleep spiritually fit, and there will be days I go to sleep numb in my own desire for comfort over discomfort. All I can offer is honesty. All I can do is be alive, practice being alive, claim this as my time to be alive.
Onward.
xo,
c
PS - The next SURJ NYC (Showing Up For Racial Justice) chapter meeting will be Thursday, July 19th at 6:30PM. If any NYC friends wanna join me for it, lemme know. xo (TinyLetter won't let me hyperlink it, but here it is: https://surjnyc.com/)
PPS - NYC friends, I still have some pies available for anyone who wants to make a donation to RAICES or another non profit helping with the crisis at the border. More here: https://twitter.com/courtneyaj/status/1009407296181547008