How our hopes, our lives unraveled

[sovay]

Apparently the country I am living in is now simultaneously belligerent and isolationist. It's a pretty terrible combination. Tonight my mother and I were discussing the Syrian refugee crisis and her desire to write a letter to the Boston Globe—which I encouraged—expressing her disappointment in Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker, who recently declared himself, along with twenty-nine other governors of the United States, "not interested in accepting refugees from Syria." I'm sure everyone has invoked Emma Lazarus vs. hypocrisy in this discussion already, so I've gone with a slightly later Jewish poet.

Copper-plated, nailed together, buffeted by ocean weather
Stands the queen of exiles and our mother she may be
Hollow-breasted, broken-hearted, watching for her dear departed
For her children cast upon the sea

At her back, the great idyllic land of justice for exilic
Peoples ponders making justice private property
Darling, never dream another woman might have been your mother
Someday you may be a refugee

—Tony Kushner, "An Undoing World"

[edit] Courtesy of rushthatspeaks: an online petition from Massachusetts voters to Governor Baker.

Comments

[sovay]

MELTING POT! WTF.

"America, nation of immigrants" is a very problematic conception, but it is a fact that I exist because my ancestors on both sides were allowed into this country despite being, respectively, Jewish and Irish, ethnic groups identified at different times by mainstream America as classically undesirable. It would be irresponsible of me not to offer support to future people in need, including from places on Earth whose politics freak me out. No one in my family came over in the 1930's or after the war,* but what does that matter? You don't need a personal connection to know a humanitarian crisis when you see one. At least, I feel you shouldn't. I don't know what it says about you if you do.

* My grandfather's father was the second of six children. His younger brother Pesachia joined him in America; his descendants live in Miami. Another brother emigrated to Israel and I believe my mother is still in touch with the current generation. Everyone else died in the Holocaust: Chełmno and Auschwitz. A thing that was very strange for me to realize recently is that all those lost relatives would have been of the same degree of kinship to me as gaudior, in whose house I am currently living. It was distancing and suddenly close at once.