So ICE is committing human rights abuses on a grand scale . . . so what else is new? Yes, they are putting young children in prison cells, breaking into homes in the wee hours of the morning and sticking guns in children's faces, ripping families apart, throwing refugees seeking safety in prison, denying injured, sick and dying prisoners care, treating innocent immigrants worse than murderers and destroying millions of lives each year - citizen and immigrant alike. We know this . . . but I was just told a story that chilled me to the bone and it did not come from the hyper-sadistic reign of ICE.
A friend of mine spoke of how immigration came and took his grandmother away to be deported. He and his sister were in school. His parents were working in the fields, his grandmother was home with this man's two younger sisters, a one year old and a toddler. This was in the mid 50s, how bad could it have been in the mid 50s? My friend came home from school at 4pm to find his grandmother gone and the two babies alone in an empty house. Fortunately they were alive. Immigration agents had taken their caretaker during the day. It was months before this man's parents were able to locate her in Mexico. She had been quickly herded onto a ship with many other immigrants and taken away, sort of reverse slaver-style. When the agents came for her she had begged them not to leave the babies alone, but they had not listened. They took her away and left two infant girls untended alone in a house all day. Anything could have happened to those children. Fortunately nothing did, but wouldn't a parent doing the same thing be brought up on charges for child endangerment? The picture I have posted on facebook in the past of the four or five year old child in a United States prison cell is bad, very bad. It is child abuse, no question about that, but this is worse and it was not done by ICE. No, this was done decades ago. There had been no terrorist attacks to use as an excuse to create such an inhumane agency. There was only immigration and they followed no rule of law or humanity.
Our human rights abuses toward immigrants have been going on for a very long time. Long before the anti-Vietnam War movement, before the Civil Rights protests, long before any of our protests aimed at bringing about a greater respect for humanity, this has been going on. What is happening now is nothing new, it is simply happening on a larger scale and during a time when news travels quickly. This was going on the whole time those protests were being waged during the 60s and no one protested. Did anyone even notice? While I was in Georgia making my personal statement in support of an end to segragation in the 60s, thousands of Mexican families were living with constant fear of the kicked in door, heartless men with guns and families torn apart. These inhuman conditions have been with us right along. Why have we not seen them? How did they go undetected for so long? Now that I look back I see that the signs were there. If I had looked just a little more closely I would have known . . . why did I not look?
This time I'm not going to finish this blog by answering my own questions. Let's just leave the questions there . . . how was a whole group of people allowed to live and work in this country while enduring slave wages, dangerous working conditions, destruction of their families, abuse and endangerment of their children and untold other forms of persecution for decades without it ever being found out, totally without protest? Have we been selling our collective soul for cheap food and clothing? How is it that we all missed this?
This is my last blog post for the year 2009. Tomorrow I start fasting to show solidarity for Fast for Our Families. I think perhaps I have some serious soul-searching to do as well, some questions I must ask myself, some answers I must find . . . Happy New Year.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Why Do This?
Recently, while visiting Audrius in that cursed prison, we were discussing the current immigration situation. For obvious reasons that is most of what we talk about since he was taken by ICE. I was saying something . . . don't even remember what, when suddenly he started to laugh and said, "You like this too much." He is glad to have a friend who values him enough to extend such effort to bring him home, but that's not going to keep him from teasing me when given the opportunity. Actually, he understands where my passion for any and every human rights battle that I've ever gotten myself into comes from (and there have been many), but most people who know me don't, so let's set the record straight. The general opinion is that I am doing this for some selfless reason - that I do this for the people for whose rights I fight. WRONG! Nothing could be further for the truth. I do this for me - to protect myself and my future - and it is because I know that I do it for me that I have so much passion to give to it.
In the essay "The Ethics of Emergencies" Ayn Rand states: "The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity. Integriy is loyalty to one's convictions and values; it is the policy of acting in accordance with one's values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality."
When I defend the human rights of any oppressed group I am operating on that principle. We are all interconnected in this world. To think otherwise would require a deliberate refusal to observe what is happening right in front of us. What happens to some child in Sudan can ultimately impact my own life, usually in ways that I will never know.
If you do not believe that, consider the case of Charles Richard Drew, the black man who was a pioneer in the preservation of blood for blood banks. His research and developments saved thousands of lives during WWII, yet he encountered immense racial injustice in his life. Fortunately a number of people stepped in and assisted him as a young man, stood up for his rights as a human being. They didn't know what he was to become, they just knew he was a person and deserved to be treated decently. If any of those individuals had turned their back, had looked the other way at a critical moment, thinking it was inconvenient to take on the powerful Jim Crow laws of that time or that his problems were not their problems, this man's life might well have taken a different path. Of course, the preservation of blood for blood banks would have been developed eventually, but not in time for those men who were saved by it in WWII and how many of us would that have affected in the end? There is no way to know as the ways in which each life impacts each other life are impossible to measure.
When we oppress some group that we perceive as being different from ourselves and thereby somehow "less" or "weaker" than we are, we oppress ourselves. The people who oppressed blacks in the time of Charles Richard Drew were doing everything within their power to prevent people like him from reaching their full potential. In his case the white supremacists who fought against the rights and equality of blacks were doing everything they could to prevent this young man from saving lives - the lives of our families and our friends. They were actively committing covert murder and they had murder in their heart - I promise you that. Look in the eyes of any full-blown racist in mid rant . . . I have done that many times . . . and I assure you, you will see the heart and soul of a criminal. This is the stuff of which holocausts, genocides and the like are made on an mass scale, but it is also the agent of death and destruction on a much more sinister and less easily seen level. Their intention is to destroy and that intention knows no boundaries. If they succeed, then my own life could be put in jeopardy and so I fight . . . against them . . . and for human rights for all mankind. And if at times it seems I become a little shrill, a little obsessive - it is because I know . . . I am fighting for my life!
In the essay "The Ethics of Emergencies" Ayn Rand states: "The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity. Integriy is loyalty to one's convictions and values; it is the policy of acting in accordance with one's values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality."
When I defend the human rights of any oppressed group I am operating on that principle. We are all interconnected in this world. To think otherwise would require a deliberate refusal to observe what is happening right in front of us. What happens to some child in Sudan can ultimately impact my own life, usually in ways that I will never know.
If you do not believe that, consider the case of Charles Richard Drew, the black man who was a pioneer in the preservation of blood for blood banks. His research and developments saved thousands of lives during WWII, yet he encountered immense racial injustice in his life. Fortunately a number of people stepped in and assisted him as a young man, stood up for his rights as a human being. They didn't know what he was to become, they just knew he was a person and deserved to be treated decently. If any of those individuals had turned their back, had looked the other way at a critical moment, thinking it was inconvenient to take on the powerful Jim Crow laws of that time or that his problems were not their problems, this man's life might well have taken a different path. Of course, the preservation of blood for blood banks would have been developed eventually, but not in time for those men who were saved by it in WWII and how many of us would that have affected in the end? There is no way to know as the ways in which each life impacts each other life are impossible to measure.
When we oppress some group that we perceive as being different from ourselves and thereby somehow "less" or "weaker" than we are, we oppress ourselves. The people who oppressed blacks in the time of Charles Richard Drew were doing everything within their power to prevent people like him from reaching their full potential. In his case the white supremacists who fought against the rights and equality of blacks were doing everything they could to prevent this young man from saving lives - the lives of our families and our friends. They were actively committing covert murder and they had murder in their heart - I promise you that. Look in the eyes of any full-blown racist in mid rant . . . I have done that many times . . . and I assure you, you will see the heart and soul of a criminal. This is the stuff of which holocausts, genocides and the like are made on an mass scale, but it is also the agent of death and destruction on a much more sinister and less easily seen level. Their intention is to destroy and that intention knows no boundaries. If they succeed, then my own life could be put in jeopardy and so I fight . . . against them . . . and for human rights for all mankind. And if at times it seems I become a little shrill, a little obsessive - it is because I know . . . I am fighting for my life!
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Fear
Fear began, originally, as a survival mechanism - still can be when a large wild animal comes crashing through the woods at you, but more often in our modern world it is an emotion that makes us less, that causes us to fail to do the right thing, the kind thing.
Not acting when one should is as great a sin, violation, overt, crime, offense – whatever your culture or belief system calls it – as acting in a manner that harms another or others. We like to pretend as long as we don’t do anything bad we are good people, but when we see people hurting, in trouble, desperate, and we do nothing to help them because of fear . . . we are not good people. We lessen ourselves through inaction when we should act as thoroughly as we do by acting in ways that we should not. And if we become less, if we slowly fade away into a shell of what we could have been, what benefit has it been to us that we managed to preserve our own necks?
“So what’s your point, Deb,” you ask. I’m getting to it . . . and you just know it’s going to have something to do with immigration, don’t you! I won’t disappoint – that’s exactly where I’m heading with this. This country was founded and built by immigrants. If you are not Native American your family came here as immigrants (those of you who want to degrade my point with speculation on whether or not our indigenous people were actually immigrants too can stuff it – it’s not germane to this topic). Our whole system of government, everything we have as a nation, has been built on the belief in “Liberty and Justice for all.” We have lost our way from time to time – and we have always regretted it. No one brags about having a grandfather who served as a guard in one of the shameful camps we kept our Japanese population in during WWII. It is a point of shame that people keep to themselves and it happened because we were afraid.
Now we are rounding up immigrants and putting them in prison, sometimes for years. We are violating everything our country stands for, virtually spitting on our own Statue of Liberty because we are afraid. We are afraid of people who are different. We are afraid of terrorists. We are afraid we can’t compete with harder working immigrants or better educated immigrants . . . or perhaps we are simply afraid of facing our own demons that we see reflected in the eyes of societies most vulnerable. Whatever the cause – the fear exists.
What is the extent of our fear? What is the cost? We detained and/or deported over 400,000 immigrants from this country last year. Some of those people were violent felons and deserved to be deported, but most were honest, hard working people. A large number had citizen families who now live tortured lives because their loved one has been banished to another land. The majority of those are children traumatized by the loss of a parent – children who will grow up to be our neighbors – our friends. Let’s estimate around 200,000 - half of all imprisoned and/or deported immigrants fall into this category and each has an average of three family members emotionally and financially ruined by such actions. Add to that at least one more whose life has been put on hold in the form of fiancées or a very close friend (these are extremely conservative estimates). We now have a conservative figure of one million people whose lives have been ruined in one year by our immigration policies and 800,000 of those are citizens - and all for no reason beyond the fact that we are afraid.
This figure does not take into account any of the daily interaction that each one of these immigrants has had in this country. It does not figure in business, social and/or community relationships and contributions. If one fourth of those deported last year were in fact of no value to others around them, either because they did not work or they were criminals (and this is a very generous, even unlikely estimate), then at least three fourths had not only family, but friends, coworkers and communities that were negatively impacted by their loss. Again – a conservative estimate would be perhaps 4 extended family members, 3 friends, as well as 3 more coworkers and other community associates who feel the loss of that one person. Do remember, most of these people are American citizens and a majority of those have roots in the USA that are many generations deep. So last year we severely emotionally and financially handicapped close to a million of our own citizens and negatively impacted another 3 million citizens all for the sake of removing around 300,000 non-criminal, hard-working human beings from our midst. Extrapolate that out over a 5 year period, figuring that the numbers does not increase (and our government is building more “detention centers” and increasing the rate of imprisonment and deportation as I write this) and you are looking at approximately 20 million Americans harmed by government actions for the sake of removing one and a half million productive people from this country.
Again, that is a very conservative estimate . . . of the cost of fear. But those figures are figures of action, not inaction. They are easy to see. What I am concerned with here is the other cost, the hidden price paid every day. For every immigrant unfairly detained and cruelly deported from family and friends there are at least 20 more people that knew about it and knew that that action was wrong. Of those, only a handful did anything to protest what was being done to that person and even fewer actually stepped up and took action to try and stop the abuse. Let’s underestimate our figures to a point of being ridiculous. Lets say only half of the human beings imprisoned and eventually deported by ICE were good people with close family ties to this country – hard working and much loved people who are greatly missed. Even then we are looking at over 4 million people walking around this country who know that they witnessed a fellow human being in trouble and did nothing to stop it. That is 4 million people who are now more afraid of this world, who are now less sure of themselves, who are now started on or moved further along that path to apathy and nothingness. And for what?! What are we afraid of? Looking at those figures, perhaps we should fear ourselves.
Not acting when one should is as great a sin, violation, overt, crime, offense – whatever your culture or belief system calls it – as acting in a manner that harms another or others. We like to pretend as long as we don’t do anything bad we are good people, but when we see people hurting, in trouble, desperate, and we do nothing to help them because of fear . . . we are not good people. We lessen ourselves through inaction when we should act as thoroughly as we do by acting in ways that we should not. And if we become less, if we slowly fade away into a shell of what we could have been, what benefit has it been to us that we managed to preserve our own necks?
“So what’s your point, Deb,” you ask. I’m getting to it . . . and you just know it’s going to have something to do with immigration, don’t you! I won’t disappoint – that’s exactly where I’m heading with this. This country was founded and built by immigrants. If you are not Native American your family came here as immigrants (those of you who want to degrade my point with speculation on whether or not our indigenous people were actually immigrants too can stuff it – it’s not germane to this topic). Our whole system of government, everything we have as a nation, has been built on the belief in “Liberty and Justice for all.” We have lost our way from time to time – and we have always regretted it. No one brags about having a grandfather who served as a guard in one of the shameful camps we kept our Japanese population in during WWII. It is a point of shame that people keep to themselves and it happened because we were afraid.
Now we are rounding up immigrants and putting them in prison, sometimes for years. We are violating everything our country stands for, virtually spitting on our own Statue of Liberty because we are afraid. We are afraid of people who are different. We are afraid of terrorists. We are afraid we can’t compete with harder working immigrants or better educated immigrants . . . or perhaps we are simply afraid of facing our own demons that we see reflected in the eyes of societies most vulnerable. Whatever the cause – the fear exists.
What is the extent of our fear? What is the cost? We detained and/or deported over 400,000 immigrants from this country last year. Some of those people were violent felons and deserved to be deported, but most were honest, hard working people. A large number had citizen families who now live tortured lives because their loved one has been banished to another land. The majority of those are children traumatized by the loss of a parent – children who will grow up to be our neighbors – our friends. Let’s estimate around 200,000 - half of all imprisoned and/or deported immigrants fall into this category and each has an average of three family members emotionally and financially ruined by such actions. Add to that at least one more whose life has been put on hold in the form of fiancées or a very close friend (these are extremely conservative estimates). We now have a conservative figure of one million people whose lives have been ruined in one year by our immigration policies and 800,000 of those are citizens - and all for no reason beyond the fact that we are afraid.
This figure does not take into account any of the daily interaction that each one of these immigrants has had in this country. It does not figure in business, social and/or community relationships and contributions. If one fourth of those deported last year were in fact of no value to others around them, either because they did not work or they were criminals (and this is a very generous, even unlikely estimate), then at least three fourths had not only family, but friends, coworkers and communities that were negatively impacted by their loss. Again – a conservative estimate would be perhaps 4 extended family members, 3 friends, as well as 3 more coworkers and other community associates who feel the loss of that one person. Do remember, most of these people are American citizens and a majority of those have roots in the USA that are many generations deep. So last year we severely emotionally and financially handicapped close to a million of our own citizens and negatively impacted another 3 million citizens all for the sake of removing around 300,000 non-criminal, hard-working human beings from our midst. Extrapolate that out over a 5 year period, figuring that the numbers does not increase (and our government is building more “detention centers” and increasing the rate of imprisonment and deportation as I write this) and you are looking at approximately 20 million Americans harmed by government actions for the sake of removing one and a half million productive people from this country.
Again, that is a very conservative estimate . . . of the cost of fear. But those figures are figures of action, not inaction. They are easy to see. What I am concerned with here is the other cost, the hidden price paid every day. For every immigrant unfairly detained and cruelly deported from family and friends there are at least 20 more people that knew about it and knew that that action was wrong. Of those, only a handful did anything to protest what was being done to that person and even fewer actually stepped up and took action to try and stop the abuse. Let’s underestimate our figures to a point of being ridiculous. Lets say only half of the human beings imprisoned and eventually deported by ICE were good people with close family ties to this country – hard working and much loved people who are greatly missed. Even then we are looking at over 4 million people walking around this country who know that they witnessed a fellow human being in trouble and did nothing to stop it. That is 4 million people who are now more afraid of this world, who are now less sure of themselves, who are now started on or moved further along that path to apathy and nothingness. And for what?! What are we afraid of? Looking at those figures, perhaps we should fear ourselves.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Sounds Familiar
My Local Net start-up page today had an article about Desiree Rogers, President Obama's White House social secretary and her responsibility or lack thereof for the recent gate crashing incident which allowed two people not on the guest list to attend and get close to the President.
Written by Jocelyn Noveckap, the article discussed Ms Rogers' many accomplishments and then stated, "But the turn of events is bewildering to Rogers' friends and associates, who say she's being misunderstood and unfairly targeted, and her accomplishments ignored. 'It's extraordinary to see someone's life's work mischaracterized in this way,' says John W. Rogers Jr., Desiree's former husband, with whom she remains close. 'I just don't understand it. She's working 12-15 hours a day, just trying to do a great job.' "
I couldn't help noticing that those are much the same words used by family, friends and acquaintances of immigrants when they are picked up and "detained" (put in prison indefinitely) by ICE. People who have worked hard and done a great job are suddenly, because of a problem with their documentation or because, though here legally, they have been picked up for a minor offense, finding themselves in prison doing hard time as ICE tries to strip them of their right to stay in this country.
Over and over you hear immigration detainees referred to as, "misunderstood and being unfairly targeted," as those of us who know them lament how horrible it is "to see someone's life's work mischaracterized in this way." It's pointed out that many of them were "working 12-15 hours a day, just trying to do a great job." Yup, that sure does sound awfully familiar.
Immigrants today are serving in our armed forces 30,000 strong. They fill jobs that American's don't want to or are not educated or experienced enough to do. They wipe our children's noses and engineer our oil drilling rigs. And yet a severely disabled, Vietnamese, Vietnam War Veteran with two grown US citizen children now sits in prison as our government tries to deport him back to Vietnam because he was picked up for driving without insurance in 1989. A frightening number of our most loyal military veterans now live outside this country, forever banished from the land they put their lives on the line for, forever separated from the families they love - for minor, non-violent offenses stemming from PTSD caused by their war service. Many adults who came here legally with their parents as small children and know no other country are sitting in prison or have already been deported for similar reasons and of course there are the ones we all hear about - hard working immigrant families who overstayed their visas or came here without documentation, many with American citizen children, who sit in prison or are deported and now live in Eastern Europe, Africa, Mexico, The Caribbean . . . because, though they worked hard and lived right, they were not here with the proper documentation and that is all that is seen . . . all that matters.
Let us hope that the Obama administration can learn from this experience and find it within their hearts to stand up for these hard working, dedicated people whose small mistake is far outweighed by their huge contributions to this country in the same way they are not standing up for the White House social secretary. It would be the honorable, fair thing to do. It's time to do it . . . past time.
Written by Jocelyn Noveckap, the article discussed Ms Rogers' many accomplishments and then stated, "But the turn of events is bewildering to Rogers' friends and associates, who say she's being misunderstood and unfairly targeted, and her accomplishments ignored. 'It's extraordinary to see someone's life's work mischaracterized in this way,' says John W. Rogers Jr., Desiree's former husband, with whom she remains close. 'I just don't understand it. She's working 12-15 hours a day, just trying to do a great job.' "
I couldn't help noticing that those are much the same words used by family, friends and acquaintances of immigrants when they are picked up and "detained" (put in prison indefinitely) by ICE. People who have worked hard and done a great job are suddenly, because of a problem with their documentation or because, though here legally, they have been picked up for a minor offense, finding themselves in prison doing hard time as ICE tries to strip them of their right to stay in this country.
Over and over you hear immigration detainees referred to as, "misunderstood and being unfairly targeted," as those of us who know them lament how horrible it is "to see someone's life's work mischaracterized in this way." It's pointed out that many of them were "working 12-15 hours a day, just trying to do a great job." Yup, that sure does sound awfully familiar.
Immigrants today are serving in our armed forces 30,000 strong. They fill jobs that American's don't want to or are not educated or experienced enough to do. They wipe our children's noses and engineer our oil drilling rigs. And yet a severely disabled, Vietnamese, Vietnam War Veteran with two grown US citizen children now sits in prison as our government tries to deport him back to Vietnam because he was picked up for driving without insurance in 1989. A frightening number of our most loyal military veterans now live outside this country, forever banished from the land they put their lives on the line for, forever separated from the families they love - for minor, non-violent offenses stemming from PTSD caused by their war service. Many adults who came here legally with their parents as small children and know no other country are sitting in prison or have already been deported for similar reasons and of course there are the ones we all hear about - hard working immigrant families who overstayed their visas or came here without documentation, many with American citizen children, who sit in prison or are deported and now live in Eastern Europe, Africa, Mexico, The Caribbean . . . because, though they worked hard and lived right, they were not here with the proper documentation and that is all that is seen . . . all that matters.
Let us hope that the Obama administration can learn from this experience and find it within their hearts to stand up for these hard working, dedicated people whose small mistake is far outweighed by their huge contributions to this country in the same way they are not standing up for the White House social secretary. It would be the honorable, fair thing to do. It's time to do it . . . past time.
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