Come on in
Change, movement, diversity: this is the way of the world.
It starts on a quiet, tree-lined street in a West Los Angeles neighborhood that used to be known as the one right by the 405 and is now called Sawtelle. I don’t recognize the block, but I lived a few minutes away for almost a decade.
It’s a part of town that doesn’t see much physical violence. Maybe that’s why he stands there stoically, hands bound behind his back — he’s too shocked to do anything else. But when the men in masks grab her, she screams.
She and her partner are both from Iran. They’re Christians, a tiny minority in their native land, who came here searching for a better life free from persecution. Lord only knows what the two of them went through over there that made them risk so much to do it.
Now we’re poised to send them back to a country where women are thrown into prison and tortured for wearing their hair uncovered or leaving home without the blessing of their husbands. And for what?
Calling it a deportation is technically correct. But that’s using a big word to pretty up the smallest and pettiest of human behavior: our instinct to tell people we see as different that no, you don’t belong here.
Right now, our government is doing this thousands of times each day. Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff who is by some accounts the person doing the business of actually running the country, has ordered ICE to arrest 3,000 people a day. Damn the torpedos, full steam ahead.
But that word, arrest, isn’t really right either. Arrest carries a whiff of justice, the promise that someone dangerous has been put away to protect the rest of us.
What we’re seeing now is kidnappings. Ordinary people are taken from their homes and families because men who hold high office don’t like anyone with brown skin or those who speak a different language.
It’s not that I don’t understand white Americans who fear that we may become a minority in this country. Most people want to feel like they’re in the middle of the herd and many more are afraid of change.
But change, movement, diversity: this is the way of the world. There’s no such thing as a society where everyone looks or thinks or feels the same. Purity doesn’t exist.
If we kick out the people who are most obviously different, we just get better at drawing lines between those who remain. Most of the world couldn’t tell a Tutsi from a Hutu. But the Hutus sure could.
The delusion that we can separate the chosen people from the rest is probably as old as time. It never works, but it also never fails to cause tremendous harm.
The Nazi death camps were known as the final solution because Nazi leaders had first tried other ways to ethnically cleanse their population. One plan was mass deportations.
The cycle gets passed down from one generation to the next. Today, descendants of those who survived the camps unleash hell in Gaza as they try to turn an ancient crossroads of humanity into a promised land built on the bones of children.
Here in America, why do ICE agents so often cover their faces? Because they know they’re walking the path marked by their predecessors in the Gestapo or the KGB before them.
I don’t hate them. I don’t hate Donald Trump or Stephen Miller. Except in my worst moments, I don’t hate anyone.
I just quietly want us all, myself very much included, to wake up to our shared humanity, to see the unity within our diversity, to bow to the nameless, formless presence that waits patiently inside.
None of us are here to be in control, not of the world or of each other. Sure, we can try, but all we do is wreck shit. Meg might say it best: As long as no one is getting hurt, why do we care how anyone else lives?
In the twelve-step community, all are welcome. It’s the rare place in America where you can see an actor you recognize sitting next to a guy who sleeps in a tent out in front of the VA hospital, because there is only one requirement for membership: a desire to stop drinking or using drugs.
Show up to an AA meeting drunk? That’s okay. So long as you want to get sober, come on in.
Come on in. Come on in. Change? Come on in. Outsiders? Come on in. The devil himself? Come on in.
I’m not saying you can’t lock your door at night, just that we could all do with some inner softening towards each other and what’s in front of us.
Nor do I want to act like I’m particularly good at this, because I’m not. But I think much of it comes down to practice.
So let’s keep at it together.
Worth your attention
Mariame Kaba on how to carry on in a time of struggle.
Paul Krugman on the president’s budget bill that aims to take healthcare from 16 million people.
Marisa Kabas on why candidates shouldn’t be afraid to run on progressive values.
Moira Donegan on how the Supreme Court just crippled the power of federal judges to stop the president from breaking the law.
And finally, here’s Joe Biden and Kamala Harris holding hands at the funeral for murdered Minnesota House Democratic leader Melissa Hortman.