To Those Good Folks With Whom I Like To Exchange Stories, share ideas,
mutually engage in real work, visit and generally keep up to date:
We moved down to Nogales the day before yesterday. We’ll spend a few days here at the Casa de Misericordia (House of Mercy), which serves as the BorderLinks compound and neighborhood community space, and then, on Friday, we’ll move in with our host families. We’ll continue reading, writing, and project-ing for our classes, which will now meet at the Casa. So, we’ll spend most everyday, during the day, at the Casa. (The Casa is a compound consisting of a dormitory (18 beds) with a cafeteria downstairs, a day care building, an office building, a classroom building, all made of concrete block, plus a flower garden, and basketball/soccer court.) Throughout our time in Nogales, we have two hours, three times a week with a Spanish tutor.
Everyday at lunch, a staff of three ladies and a couple of volunteers prepare and serve a noonday meal to one or two hundred neighborhood kids who’s parents work in the maquiladores, Free-Trade-Factories, (or maquilas for short) and, so, can’t come home for lunch. The plan is for us, semester students to eat with the children most days. Yesterday, the meal consisted of pasta salad and refried beans with crackers on the side and a cup full of sugar water colored red; that is, “juice.”
Lest you miss the irony, know that I’m hypoglycemic. My blood sugar rushed upward and, promptly, crashes if I eat sugar or basic carbohydrates. Basically, if I understand it right, my pancreas is on steroids, so whenever I eat anything related to sugar, it releases insulin with the force of Niagara Falls. For about twenty minutes I feel like I took speed: I start sweating, my face gets all red, I feel like I could conquer Everest, and my vision becomes incredibly clear. Then everything reverses: irritable, lethargic, apathetic, uninspired, and my brain becomes really foggy and slow. The after effects last up to a day or two. Frijoles (beans), pasta, crackers, and punch. Pues (Well).
So I got out a can of tuna. Looks like I’ll be eating a lot of it these next few weeks. “Hey Nathan. What’d you have for lunch today? Eh?” Tuna. “How about yesterday? Tomorrow?” You guessed it. Heck. If you’re considering a career path in canned fish, let me know.
I believe that we are called to take steps to the margins of society. I believe that we have a responsibility to know about and experience the underbelly of the global economy, to know the people on whose backs we ride. We all, in one-way or another, catch piggyback rides at others’ expense. It started, if not before, in middle school—everywhere. And due to our global influence made possible through cheap energy, we can, incredibly, ride the backs of others on the far side of our own continent and far side of the globe.
As I was saying, I believe that we are called to take steps beyond our privilege, however it might express itself (wealth, age, association, coolness, race, gender, southern-ness, whatever). We are called to ride the wave between comfort and panic. We are called to hear and tell stories with folks we don’t know and we’d be unlikely to know because of the various walls that divide us. We’re called to offer mutual aid and support across the boundaries of division because we can create a world that is better for all involved.
Yeah, but the truth of the matter is that philosophy, ideas, whatever—although it may glow with justice and goodness, Listen—it’s not easy. Eeeesy. This is not my regular life. If you’ll allow me, once again, a moment of irreverent honesty, I’ve got little bit of reality to share with you.
The truth of the matter is, I still don’t know the family I’m going to be living with for five weeks. I haven’t met them. I don’t know their name. We meet on Thursday night; we move in on Friday. During lunch, I wonder at the four year old kids speaking Spanish: they’re vastly ahead of me. I keep catching myself flabbergasted by their skills. How can they know all those words? I think. Then, I remember they grew up with the language. My Spanish is improving, but, lord, I’ve got a long way to go. I’m hypoglycemic, and the people here eat beans and tortillas. I have a clear mind because I live in an affluent family in the most affluent country the world has ever known.
So, aside from my concern about where and who I’m living with, language, and food, I also carry concerns about having concerns: “Nathan. You’re going to deal with it for five weeks, tops. You get to go back to your posh life. Deal with it. If you were born in most any other place in the world, you’d just learn to live with a foggy brain. You’d read four times slower because you would eat carbohydrates because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t eat—But I’ve got projects and continued reading on the border.” The tension pulls back and forth. And then I think about language: “Nathan, really. Don’t you realize that tons of folks all over the world move to other countries and regions out of necessity and can’t speak the language yet. They’re learning as fast as they can, but they don’t necessarily have the four people you have that speak their native language with whom you can relax and speak without thinking.” I feel my body tighten. Before and, moreso, after meals, my belly feels stiff.
Really what I’m trying to tell you is that I was constipated. Really, there’s nothing like it. Full. Over-full, all the time. My cup filleth up, except it’s supposed to subside. Except it doesn’t. “Oh, I think I’m going to sit down. Gosh, I’m wiped-out.” Laying down is no relief. Full. Over-full, all the time. And remember, I’m hypoglycemic. In order to control my blood sugar, I eat every few hours. So, I add a little more. A little more. Full. Over-full, all the time.
I think perhaps the most disappointing thing in the whole world is a full belly that just won’t let go in the moment, the judgment day of constipation, at the pleasant surprise of cool porcelain, on the pot.
My fellow students looked me over and asked, “Nathan. Are you alright? You’re looking a little…” but they never finished the sentence. Either they couldn’t figure it out, or they didn’t grow up in the house with a nurse as their mother. I hear that in some houses bodily functions are not dinner conversations. Well. I’ll let you guess about mine.
I apologize in advance: Early last summer (’06), I was getting into stories. I decided that I’d make my way into stories by writing down stories as I heard them or as I experienced them. I was in the mountains of North Carolina with my father. We were camping and going on hikes everyday. From the time he’d picked me up from school, I kept my eyes and ears tuned to stories, but I just didn’t see any. Anything I contemplated writing down was more like a summation of events, which are lists and, although they can be engaging at times, they’re not really stories. Then—
This one morning, I was making our lunch, spreading mayonnaise on bread making sandwiches or something, and my father walked down from the tent where he’d been sweeping it out. He walked kind of stiff legged like, and said, “Oh, um.” He looked at me with the strained eyes of a two-year-old which reveals the secret of secret places. “It’s like a snake that wants to get out,” he paused, “I mean BAD!” He waddled off to the camp bathroom. Struggling. He said something over his shoulder about if it started raining that I ought to put his clothes under the tarp. He, really, was in no position to make requests.
Okay, but that’s not all.
The next morning, same time. There I was fixing lunch again. Spreading mayo or something, when my Dad dropped a bag of ropes on the table, laughed and said, “S—time,” though I couldn’t distinguish his syllable. “What time?” I asked. “He he, SNAKE time!” he said as he heading for the bathroom.
And there it was, hissing at me in the face: a story. It was the first one I wrote down in my storybook- journal—ever. In spite of any insult you may feel I give my father in repeating this story, I salute him for it. It made me realize that the stories are all around us, and most of the time, story boils down to ten seconds of dialog with a good five minutes of build up. Stories. They’re our lives.
Saul Alinsky, the Chicagoan organizer with Back of our Yards, made frequent allusions to bodily functions and the bathroom. He justified it because he said, more or less, “Look. There are few things in this world that are truly universal. But everybody has to go to the bathroom. Everybody. So everyone can relate.” So perhaps I speak of the bathroom for you to understand. Or perhaps it’s because I grew up in the house with my mother, the nurse. Perhaps it’s because of our family’s medical conversations or my father’s loose orifice (mouth, mouth! Get your mind out of the gutter.) Or perhaps my thoughts are just preoccupied with the simple pleasures of life.
So, I’ve held you in suspense long enough.
I took a poo, and it was glorious.
I’ve since taken a few more. I’ll allow your imagination to fill in the blessed sighs of relief.
Today, I walked around with my Spanish tutor. He’s a fantastic man named Elias. Walking by the kitchen, he said, “Huele de tortillas” (It smells of tortillas). “Huele,” I repeated. “Pies” (feet), I said, “Pies huelen” (feet smell). Almost immediately, I asked him, “Como se dice,” (How do you say) “cuando pies huelen como un pescado se morio?” (when feet smell like a fish that died?) He told me the word is “apestan (stink).” Tus (your) pies apestan de pescado muerto (Your feet smell of dead fish).
I swear: humor is definitely one of the best ways to learn and communicate.
Nathan
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Update from the Border: An Open Letter, VOL VII
To Those Good Folks With Whom I Like To Exchange Stories, share ideas, mutually engage in real work, visit and generally keep up to date:
From the messages I've been receiving, I seems as though, perhaps, folks think that I'm struggling. Well, I've be wressling, yeah, but hardly struggling. I've been synthesizing. I've been strategizing, planning, imagining, instigating, trying like hell to learn spanish, reading, remembering, writing, chatting, walking, seeing, reflecting.
Pending the department's approval, I'll be compiling a senior thesis next spring of personal writings and research on social movements. In that light, you could say, I'm in my element here on the border. I suppose the best way to illustrate this is to cut short the description and share with you an open letter I just composed addressed to "organizers and activists of the Borderlands Movement."
An open letter to the Organizers and Activists of the Borderlands Movement:
Several things have occurred to me regarding the potential Borderlands Movement.
But first, to root myself in experience, I must share with you about a young man I met last week at the Quaker meeting. I'll call him Dwight. Having recently completed his commitment to the Navy in Afghanistan, accepted a job with Homeland Security here in the Boderlands, and began his civilian life in Tucson; he was not the man I expected to meet at the Quaker meeting. It was his second time attending.
"I took care of getting a job," he told me. "So then I knew—my wife and I knew—we had to attend to our spiritual lives." He took a spiritual/religious survey online, he told me, and it told him that he was just about one-hundred percent Quaker. Or one-hundred percent Buddhist. "I don't mean them any disrespect, but I'm not Buddhist," he explained. He made a point to meet me because during visitor self-introductions, —a Quaker tradition—I said I went to school just outside of Asheville, NC.
He asked me if I'd "ever heard of a little place named Swannanoa?" His interest was rooted in his roots: he grew up there. (Warren Wilson College, my school is in the heart of the Swannanoa Valley.) Dwight's father and grandfather worked at the Beacon plant, the textile mill that was the primary employer, life-blood and exploiter of the valley for around 100 years until it closed shop in 2004 to move to Central America for cheaper wage-labor.
He asked what I was doing in Tucson, so I gave him my worn out summary: "BorderLinks semester on the Border… a few months in Tucson… Nogales… travel on both sides of the border… Magdalena… Altar, the place where migrants meet up with their guides to travel through the desert—"
He interrupted me. "Now that's," he began, looking around at the other Quakers, "Something I just don't understand around here," referencing the meetinghouse. "My job is to stop those people sneaking in."
He mentioned something about Muslim terrorists posing as Mexicans seeking to harm us because of the freedoms we enjoy.
"Huh," I said. "Is that right? How about that?" I suppose it was my mother who taught me to listen and wait, listening through initial disagreement in order to hear what otherwise would be missed, trusting the conversation and the relationship to push beyond sound bites and rehearsed phrases; to listen and wait enabling people the chance to offer each other something not previously considered, the chance to share from beyond one another's places of comfort. I waited. He continued.
He said a few things that I now forget, and I replied, "Yeah, huh, well, yeah, I hadn't thought of that before. I'm just down here trying to learn more about the Border, so I don't have to rely on the TV to tell me what's going on. You just can't trust it a lot of the time." I told him about a few of our stops along our travel seminar: Border Patrol, Grupo Beta, and a few other stops in the Borderlands.
"I just don't get it," he said. "If they'd just come in legal like the Europeans and Asians…"
"Huh. Yeah. I wonder what that process is," I said.
"It's just all this sneaking…. Besides. They're poor. So why don't they just plant themselves some food? Take care of themselves? I still don't see why—The Europeans, the Asians. They come in legal. It's just all this sneaking."
"Hm," I responded. "That's a good question."
Off hand, I mentioned land speculators pushing people off their land, bad economies, the lack of options and the coyote organizations that include recruiters "all the way down in South Mexico—and even Central America." And then I mentioned quotas, long waits.
"Then, why don't they just wait?" he asked. Frustration looking for an answer. But a question. They weren't fighting words. It was a question.
"That's a good question. I, I don't really know. I think maybe it was something to do with being hungry. But the truth is, I, I don't really know."
"Yeah, well," he responded. "Coming in illegal makes you question a person's core values. You've gotta wonder whether they're honest or not."
Like I mentioned, several things occurred to me this past week concerning the potential Borderlands Movement. First, inspired by Freire, I realized that Americans cannot give the migrants their liberation. It is something Americans can support and aid, but they cannot lead the way. Migrants must lead their own liberation. Perhaps Americans have a role in dramatically illustrating their support, rolling out a red carpet of sorts. In the end, Americans can walk along side, but the explicit movement—like the great migration, the continental momentum—must be initiated from beyond the United States' borders, which leads me to another point.
The Populist, the Labor, and Civil Rights Movement I have previously claimed as strictly American movements. But now I see, they neither were nor are American movements. They were and are the movements of people. And this Borderlands Movement, if there is to be one, will also be a movement of people.
In addition, this movement must be international. It must transcend the border. It must bridge and defy the border that is only as historical as 1848 and only real on paper and temporarily real in wire, fences, and search towers. Ultimately, the movement must be more than bi-national, though it will start here.
It also occurred to me that Dwight is not an enemy of the migrants. He spoke many of the questions and concerns that we should daily ask ourselves. "Why don't they just plant something, take care of themselves?" Indeed. Why do they not? Why can they not? If we coordinate and influence the Borderlands Movement well, we will return to Dwight's question and its cousin: Why are migrants leaving their homes? With the power of movement, we will be able to address these questions that currently haunt our efforts as ghosts, questions seemingly too big, too distant, too political, too global. These questions will become the sustaining provocateur of the Borderlands Movement.
At first Dwight's questions are seen as a threat. They should not be. Why? Because his last statement, his true worry—"You've got to worry whether they're honest or not"—is a worry shared by many in the United States. And it is so easily confronted. Migrants need only be honest. Absolutely honest. Bravely honest. Determinedly honest. Provocatively honest. Forcibly honest.
Gandhi spoke and lived that the point must never be to defeat the adversary but to recruit the adversary to the side of justice, goodwill, right-livelihood, and peace. The point, as Freire puts it, is not to reverse the structure of oppression, making the oppressed the oppressor, but to eliminate this dynamic, thus creating a better world for all. The point is for the oppressed to rise with subsistence to dignity and to redeem the oppressor from the state of mere having to the point of being. In the end, the adversary, whether active or passive, becomes the greatest alley to the cause of justice because the energy of worry and calculation is liberated through understanding to the energy, the great power of love.
I have myself been so converted.
So many that Dwight represents worry that the migrants come to the USA to steal jobs, to rob their homes, to prey on American children. They fear concealment of weapons, drug smuggling, and sneaking. They fear the lack of papers and the use of false papers. They fear migrants may not be honest.
What it comes down to is that they fear dishonesty.
I suggest we confront their fears with honesty. Absolute honesty. Brave honesty. Determined honesty. Provocative honesty. Forceful honesty.
I have an idea. It is full of flaws, I am sure, but I'd like to share it with you.
Let us, migrant and resident, march to the United States' ports of entry with simple hand-written papers which display our name, place of origin, intent and probable destination in the USA, signed by clergy or family members for legitimacy. Let us march—Brown, Black, and White; Indian, Mestizo, and Anglo—together with papers written in honest handwriting, sealed with the sweat of good work and the intent of justice. Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, El Salvadoran, Honduran, Mexican and American together. Let us walk through the ports of entry as honest travelers. Let us walk to cause a response. And let our numbers be such that we will continue marching through the ports of entry until we cause a response or until the laws restricting the free flow of migrants are repealed, nil and void, and the walls that divide us, like Jericho, like Berlin, "come a tumbling down."
The social momentum that, like a wave, like a freight train, is soon to rise and pass us by began decades ago. It picked up steam in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA, its great counter force. It encountered an ocean shelf and so rose a bit higher in 2004 with a tide of migrants. The momentum extends through Mexico, throughout Central America. It is a wave growing larger, a train that cannot be derailed. It is quickly transforming from social momentum into the Social Movement Express, the Borderlands Wave of Change.
Our job is not to create the wave or push the train. Our job is to foreworn and organize for its coming. Yet unlike the prophets of old who were ignored and rejected, we will share the story to be heard. We will ask the questions that cause deep breaths. We will create, transform, and support the organizations that will provide collective strength, coordinate non-violent action, and organize to create a better world.
We will not, should not, shall not let this movement—this moment—pass us by.
May grace blossom in the desert as love shines from the heavens. May people walk with the non-violent determination and joy carried by those who hold the possible in their hearts.
My friends, we,
We have a story.
Unlike a tale,
Our story has an unclear beginning,
And it will never end.
Ours is the story of things not as they should be.
Ours is the story of a people,
of a world,
hungry and thirsty for Shalom.
And ours is the story of the weary glance
we cast at the unimaginable mountain of Shalom
And yet,
Ours is the story of how we rose to the challenge.
Yes, my friends.
We.
We have a story.
We will do our great work.
We will grow weary,
But, ah: We will rise.
Nathan
From the messages I've been receiving, I seems as though, perhaps, folks think that I'm struggling. Well, I've be wressling, yeah, but hardly struggling. I've been synthesizing. I've been strategizing, planning, imagining, instigating, trying like hell to learn spanish, reading, remembering, writing, chatting, walking, seeing, reflecting.
Pending the department's approval, I'll be compiling a senior thesis next spring of personal writings and research on social movements. In that light, you could say, I'm in my element here on the border. I suppose the best way to illustrate this is to cut short the description and share with you an open letter I just composed addressed to "organizers and activists of the Borderlands Movement."
An open letter to the Organizers and Activists of the Borderlands Movement:
Several things have occurred to me regarding the potential Borderlands Movement.
But first, to root myself in experience, I must share with you about a young man I met last week at the Quaker meeting. I'll call him Dwight. Having recently completed his commitment to the Navy in Afghanistan, accepted a job with Homeland Security here in the Boderlands, and began his civilian life in Tucson; he was not the man I expected to meet at the Quaker meeting. It was his second time attending.
"I took care of getting a job," he told me. "So then I knew—my wife and I knew—we had to attend to our spiritual lives." He took a spiritual/religious survey online, he told me, and it told him that he was just about one-hundred percent Quaker. Or one-hundred percent Buddhist. "I don't mean them any disrespect, but I'm not Buddhist," he explained. He made a point to meet me because during visitor self-introductions, —a Quaker tradition—I said I went to school just outside of Asheville, NC.
He asked me if I'd "ever heard of a little place named Swannanoa?" His interest was rooted in his roots: he grew up there. (Warren Wilson College, my school is in the heart of the Swannanoa Valley.) Dwight's father and grandfather worked at the Beacon plant, the textile mill that was the primary employer, life-blood and exploiter of the valley for around 100 years until it closed shop in 2004 to move to Central America for cheaper wage-labor.
He asked what I was doing in Tucson, so I gave him my worn out summary: "BorderLinks semester on the Border… a few months in Tucson… Nogales… travel on both sides of the border… Magdalena… Altar, the place where migrants meet up with their guides to travel through the desert—"
He interrupted me. "Now that's," he began, looking around at the other Quakers, "Something I just don't understand around here," referencing the meetinghouse. "My job is to stop those people sneaking in."
He mentioned something about Muslim terrorists posing as Mexicans seeking to harm us because of the freedoms we enjoy.
"Huh," I said. "Is that right? How about that?" I suppose it was my mother who taught me to listen and wait, listening through initial disagreement in order to hear what otherwise would be missed, trusting the conversation and the relationship to push beyond sound bites and rehearsed phrases; to listen and wait enabling people the chance to offer each other something not previously considered, the chance to share from beyond one another's places of comfort. I waited. He continued.
He said a few things that I now forget, and I replied, "Yeah, huh, well, yeah, I hadn't thought of that before. I'm just down here trying to learn more about the Border, so I don't have to rely on the TV to tell me what's going on. You just can't trust it a lot of the time." I told him about a few of our stops along our travel seminar: Border Patrol, Grupo Beta, and a few other stops in the Borderlands.
"I just don't get it," he said. "If they'd just come in legal like the Europeans and Asians…"
"Huh. Yeah. I wonder what that process is," I said.
"It's just all this sneaking…. Besides. They're poor. So why don't they just plant themselves some food? Take care of themselves? I still don't see why—The Europeans, the Asians. They come in legal. It's just all this sneaking."
"Hm," I responded. "That's a good question."
Off hand, I mentioned land speculators pushing people off their land, bad economies, the lack of options and the coyote organizations that include recruiters "all the way down in South Mexico—and even Central America." And then I mentioned quotas, long waits.
"Then, why don't they just wait?" he asked. Frustration looking for an answer. But a question. They weren't fighting words. It was a question.
"That's a good question. I, I don't really know. I think maybe it was something to do with being hungry. But the truth is, I, I don't really know."
"Yeah, well," he responded. "Coming in illegal makes you question a person's core values. You've gotta wonder whether they're honest or not."
Like I mentioned, several things occurred to me this past week concerning the potential Borderlands Movement. First, inspired by Freire, I realized that Americans cannot give the migrants their liberation. It is something Americans can support and aid, but they cannot lead the way. Migrants must lead their own liberation. Perhaps Americans have a role in dramatically illustrating their support, rolling out a red carpet of sorts. In the end, Americans can walk along side, but the explicit movement—like the great migration, the continental momentum—must be initiated from beyond the United States' borders, which leads me to another point.
The Populist, the Labor, and Civil Rights Movement I have previously claimed as strictly American movements. But now I see, they neither were nor are American movements. They were and are the movements of people. And this Borderlands Movement, if there is to be one, will also be a movement of people.
In addition, this movement must be international. It must transcend the border. It must bridge and defy the border that is only as historical as 1848 and only real on paper and temporarily real in wire, fences, and search towers. Ultimately, the movement must be more than bi-national, though it will start here.
It also occurred to me that Dwight is not an enemy of the migrants. He spoke many of the questions and concerns that we should daily ask ourselves. "Why don't they just plant something, take care of themselves?" Indeed. Why do they not? Why can they not? If we coordinate and influence the Borderlands Movement well, we will return to Dwight's question and its cousin: Why are migrants leaving their homes? With the power of movement, we will be able to address these questions that currently haunt our efforts as ghosts, questions seemingly too big, too distant, too political, too global. These questions will become the sustaining provocateur of the Borderlands Movement.
At first Dwight's questions are seen as a threat. They should not be. Why? Because his last statement, his true worry—"You've got to worry whether they're honest or not"—is a worry shared by many in the United States. And it is so easily confronted. Migrants need only be honest. Absolutely honest. Bravely honest. Determinedly honest. Provocatively honest. Forcibly honest.
Gandhi spoke and lived that the point must never be to defeat the adversary but to recruit the adversary to the side of justice, goodwill, right-livelihood, and peace. The point, as Freire puts it, is not to reverse the structure of oppression, making the oppressed the oppressor, but to eliminate this dynamic, thus creating a better world for all. The point is for the oppressed to rise with subsistence to dignity and to redeem the oppressor from the state of mere having to the point of being. In the end, the adversary, whether active or passive, becomes the greatest alley to the cause of justice because the energy of worry and calculation is liberated through understanding to the energy, the great power of love.
I have myself been so converted.
So many that Dwight represents worry that the migrants come to the USA to steal jobs, to rob their homes, to prey on American children. They fear concealment of weapons, drug smuggling, and sneaking. They fear the lack of papers and the use of false papers. They fear migrants may not be honest.
What it comes down to is that they fear dishonesty.
I suggest we confront their fears with honesty. Absolute honesty. Brave honesty. Determined honesty. Provocative honesty. Forceful honesty.
I have an idea. It is full of flaws, I am sure, but I'd like to share it with you.
Let us, migrant and resident, march to the United States' ports of entry with simple hand-written papers which display our name, place of origin, intent and probable destination in the USA, signed by clergy or family members for legitimacy. Let us march—Brown, Black, and White; Indian, Mestizo, and Anglo—together with papers written in honest handwriting, sealed with the sweat of good work and the intent of justice. Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, El Salvadoran, Honduran, Mexican and American together. Let us walk through the ports of entry as honest travelers. Let us walk to cause a response. And let our numbers be such that we will continue marching through the ports of entry until we cause a response or until the laws restricting the free flow of migrants are repealed, nil and void, and the walls that divide us, like Jericho, like Berlin, "come a tumbling down."
The social momentum that, like a wave, like a freight train, is soon to rise and pass us by began decades ago. It picked up steam in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA, its great counter force. It encountered an ocean shelf and so rose a bit higher in 2004 with a tide of migrants. The momentum extends through Mexico, throughout Central America. It is a wave growing larger, a train that cannot be derailed. It is quickly transforming from social momentum into the Social Movement Express, the Borderlands Wave of Change.
Our job is not to create the wave or push the train. Our job is to foreworn and organize for its coming. Yet unlike the prophets of old who were ignored and rejected, we will share the story to be heard. We will ask the questions that cause deep breaths. We will create, transform, and support the organizations that will provide collective strength, coordinate non-violent action, and organize to create a better world.
We will not, should not, shall not let this movement—this moment—pass us by.
May grace blossom in the desert as love shines from the heavens. May people walk with the non-violent determination and joy carried by those who hold the possible in their hearts.
My friends, we,
We have a story.
Unlike a tale,
Our story has an unclear beginning,
And it will never end.
Ours is the story of things not as they should be.
Ours is the story of a people,
of a world,
hungry and thirsty for Shalom.
And ours is the story of the weary glance
we cast at the unimaginable mountain of Shalom
And yet,
Ours is the story of how we rose to the challenge.
Yes, my friends.
We.
We have a story.
We will do our great work.
We will grow weary,
But, ah: We will rise.
Nathan
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