The End of Guantanamo Bay is Just the Beginning

Yesterday morning, Barack Obama signed executive orders to end the CIA’s secret overseas prisons, ban coercive interrogations (read “torture”), and close Guantanamo Bay within a year.  In just his second full day in office, Obama made good on one of his campaign promises, saying that “our ideals give us the strength and moral high ground” to combat terrorism.  (Shane, Scott. New York Times) The whole world must have breathed a sigh of relief to see the United States moving back towards its role as a leader in human rights.

Since 2002, this small base in Cuba has housed detainees, many of whom were held without charges, representation, or many basic human rights.  As Vince Walker famously said when Gandhi’s followers were brutally attacked and killed by the British following the 1930 salt march, “Whatever moral ascendancy the West held was lost here today.” (http://lisahendrix.com/2008/06/).  As the United States has attempted to encourage countries like Iran, China, and North Korea to cease their violations of human rights, our exhortations have sounded hollow when Guantanamo Bay was in full operation just miles from Florida.

All Americans should applaud this bold move by Obama to move the United States back into its place an international leader.  But this must only be the beginning.  Within our borders, detention centers are cropping up in every state.  Texas is building new “immigrant processing” centers every year, and this for-profit business is rapidly expanding.  As the United States continues to balk on comprehensive immigration reform, these containment camps flourish while immigrants languish.  Few know where they are, even fewer know the name of a local lawyer who can represent them. Many will sit for months in cold dark cells, some for years.  In the last 6 years, from 2002 to 2008, immigrants detained in like centers have skyrocketed from under 21,000 to more than 31,000.  Disabled immigrants and those with mental health issues aren’t being served, and often their conditions are worsening steadily.  As Equal Justice Fellow at Advocacy Health Services of LA Greg Pleasants, “All protections that exist in other areas of the law (for mentally and developmentally disabled individuals) do not exist for these respondents.”  (Tillman, Laura. Brownsville Herald).  Just last week, federal immigration officials investigating the tragic death of Chinese comuter engineer Hiu Lui Ng in Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility of Central Falls, R.I, revealed that he had been denied treatment and his cancer and fractured spine had been undiagnosed, leading to his agonizing death on August 6, 2008. (Bernstein, Nina).

Thankfully, some changes have already begun to have a positive effect.  Since unaccompanied minors were removed from adult detention centers and switched from DHS (Department of Homeland Security) jurisdiction to that of Health and Human Services, their care has substantially increased and they are being better served.  With Guantanamo Bay closed and the United States human rights record looking better, we must continue to encourage our administration to take positive steps to eradicate human rights abuses within this nation.  Our immigration system must move towards a day when immigrants are not criminals or numbers but people, families, lives, souls.  Please don’t stop at Cuba, Mr. Obama.

Moving Toward the One

Always, we begin again toward the One…

At this morning’s Friends Meeting in Rochester, MN, one woman felt inspired to share these words. Its truth could not have more evident after a week which saw Minnesota sadly moving toward division and disunity.

The Republican National Convention was held in St. Paul this past week. George Bush, leader of the GOP and the nation, was noticeably absent from the Xcel Center, the first time in 40 years that the incumbent President was not present at his party’s convention (Von Drehle, David). An entire country looked to the capital of Minnesota to witness the celebration and inauguration of the Presidential race in earnest. After a graceful Democratic convention the previous week, everyone’s eyes were tuned to see how newly chosen Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin would compare to Obama’s running mate Joe Biden. The United States looked calculatingly toward St. Paul to see how the Republicans would celebrate their past successes, apologize for their past missteps, and prepare for a hotly contested Presidential campaign.

What the nation got was the worst kind of rhetoric. To watch Palin’s first speech as a Vice-Presidential running mate was to watch a vicious personal attack (New York Times). In a night that should have been full of celebrating, Wednesday’s speeches were concerned primarily with jabs and uppercuts. Rather than tout her party’s successes or laud John McCain’s many admirable qualities, she instead focused on demonizing Obama and Biden and the entire Democratic party. Her speech was less about accepting her nomination and more about rejecting commonality and unity. It saddened Republicans and Democrats and Independents alike to see an entire speech devoid of civil discourse, brimming with violence and overflowing with disunity.

While John McCain’s speech was graceful and stately, it was overshadowed for many by the speech Palin gave the night before. In stark contrast to the Democratic Convention the week before, the Republican speakers rarely used the words proud, together, thanks, and grateful. Whereas Hillary Clinton used her speech to bridge gaps and convert opposition into unity, Palin’s speech, and Giuliani’s before hers, widened differences, infused hate into the rhetoric, and filled the public sphere with negativity. It was sad to see a race which had been surprisingly cordial and civil take a decided turn for the worse.

Always we begin again toward the One…

Sadly, the protests of the Republican National Convention ended little better. While most demonstrators were peaceful, the presence of many physically and verbally violent protestors drained its potentially positive impact. Nonviolence is not simply the absence of violence but rather the presence of something positive. These protests, then, failed to live up to the high standard of nonviolence. Few were edified by the anarchists’ riots of Monday, and Martin Luther King, Jr. would not have recognized the Poor People’s March on Wednesday. Signs reading “Eat the Rich, Feed the Poor” and chants calling for the National Guard troops on downtown buildings to “Jump, Jump, Jump” would have horrified Gandhi or John Lewis (Minnesota Independent).

As Dr. King and all nonviolence philosophy holds, we are caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality. Therefore, violence towards some is violence towards all. And as Gandhi reiterated throughout his life’s work, the end is necessarily preexistent in the means. If we strive for peace, we must do it in peaceful ways. If we yearn for unity, we must seek reconciliation with those who oppose us. The protests of this past week were ineffective toward that end. When anti-war protests are verbally abusive or physically violent, then they can only help to create a more disunified world of violence.

So begins a new week. Hopefully this week Minnesota and the entire nation can begin to move away from the “us versus them” mentality. Perhaps we can abandon the idea of the “other,” a philosophy which has produced slavery, imperialism, colonialism, nativism, xenophobia, and war in all its guises. Always we begin again Toward the One…

Satyagraha in Manhattan and the Americas

The MET is staging Satyagraha in New York City. Philip Glass‘s 1979 opera about Gandhi’s life and philosophy of “holding on to truth” is a spectacle which makes me wish I were in Manhattan for a matinee. Julian Crouch, one of the artistic directors of Improbable Theater Company of London, stated that the giant puppets of this opera were chosen because “…we wanted to use very humble materials in the making of the opera…We wanted similarly to take these materials, maybe associated with poverty, and see if we could do a kind of alchemy with that, turn them into something beautiful” (NYT). This opera shows Mohandis Gandhi meeting with his philosophical mentor Leo Tolstoy and with his inspired follower Martin Luther King, Jr. In the meantime, newspapers are transformed into puppets, wadded pages represent rocks, and other texts are molded to resemble Hindu goddesses in a transformation of the mundane into the sacred, the profane into the divine.

I wish the Improbable Theater Company could travel to Brownsville, Texas, bringing with it the ideas of nonviolence and civil disobedience to a border region currently preparing to oppose an unjust border wall through its homes and backyards. If Satyagraha could be staged in Dean Porter Park, perhaps the poorest city in the United States would see that it does not need money or political power in order to stand for the Truth. The Truth is compelling, and when men and women refuse to resort to violence but instead seek reconciliation in the face of injustice, we have to believe that the spark of the divine will be ignited in our fellow Man when he is confronted with the morality of our plea. A border wall, above and beyond beyond environmentally unsound, politically backwards, and environmentally devastating, is morally reprehensible.

On April 1, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff used the REAL ID Act to waive 39 laws in an effort to speed up the construction of the border wall. All 100 Senators voted for this act, a piece of legislation predominantly concerned with driver’s licenses but with a rider granting unprecedented powers to waive all laws in constructing border barriers. In traditional Jewish law, a law which was passed unanimously was thrown out – something must have been amiss. In Gandhi’s book, Satyagraha, he writes, ““It is a superstition and ungodly thing to believe that an act of a majority binds a minority…all reforms owe their origin to the initiation of minorities in opposition to majorities” (18). The overwhelming vote for the REAL ID Act must not dissuade us from speaking truth and campaigning for the overturning of these waivers.

Valley residents are not alone, however. The minority in opposition to a wall is growing, and we have the moral power of knowing we are right. Thank you, Rep. Thompson, for your courageous stand along with 14 other Congressman. We pray your Amicus Curiae brief will persuade the Supreme Court to take case with Homeland Security’s ability to waive unlimited legislation to expedite the Secure Fence Act of 2006. It is encouraging to know that the unanimous vote in the Senate is not the entire story.

It is also encouraging to note that the European Union is currently considering the introduction of a decade of nonviolence, a year after dissolving the last of its countries’ borders. It is heartening to know that the E.U. recognizes, “Gandhian non-violence to be the most appropriate means of ensuring that fundamental human rights are enjoyed, upheld, promoted and respected” (http://www.unpo.org/content/view/7980/83/). It is encouraging to know that the spirit of nonviolence was not killed along with Gandhi and King, that it survives even though the United States has already started clearing brush from its levees in South Texas, fully intending to build a border wall between itself and its neighbors to the South. Nonviolence, that soul-force which King preached and which is parading in New York’s MET right now, still walks the streets and marches on, despite the fact that the Secure Fence Act of 2006 still stands as a blight upon our nation, culture, and all immigrants, a symbol of division in a time when we need unity.

We, the people of the Valley, call for the prayers and support of all concerned citizens at this crucial time in American history. The people of the Valley are already fighting the legal battle and will continue to campaign for Justice through the courts. In addition, we are readying for civil disobedience, should it come to that. Groups such as Fellowship of Reconciliation and Christian Peacemakers, as well as individuals like the American Gandhi, have already expressed interest in training a group of concerned citizens in proper, positive civil disobedience.  We welcome any and all support in our efforts of reconciliation as opposed to division. We join with Christian thought in recognizing that we inevitably reap what we sow, and we seek to keep the United States from sowing a seed of dissension and division rather than working on communication and mutually beneficial relations with brothers and sisters of the world.

Nopales, Enemies, and Assets…

Gandhi once wrote, “In the dictionary of the non-violent there is no such word as an external enemy” (Satyagraha, 93). This concept is key to understanding the dynamics of India’s liberation movement, King’s civil rights movement, and the ongoing use of nonviolence. For Gandhi, an “enemy” is just someone who doesn’t realize they are his friend yet. If one views opposition as a potential ally, then reconciliation is the aim rather than victory. Victory is achieved together through mutual progress.

Relocating to la frontera, one is confronted with a host of new cuisine. Barbacoa (stewed beef cheek), tamales veracruzano (corn paste baked in a banana leaf), elotes (roasted corn swimming in mayonnaise), menudo (spicy stew made of cow intestines and touted to be the ultimate hangover cure) – all these new foods astound newcomers to the border and remind us all of limitless creativity.

But the food I love best here in Brownsville and Matamoros are nopales.

Nopales are prickly-pear cacti. Their fruits, tunas, are a delicious mix between honeydew and pomegranate. But it is the spiky cacti themselves that are a delicacy here on the border. De-spined, the green fleshy vegetable is diced and stewed for hours. It is often served with eggs for breakfast – mmmm, huevos con nopales in the morning.

I am struck by the nonviolence this food embodies. Most people when confronted with a cactus write it off as something to be avoided, a painful and dangerous plant. Other people would try to clear these cacti from their land, equating them with weeds and scrub. But the Mexicanos and Tejanos on this border look at these short, spiky plants and see nourishment. Instead of a nuisance, nutrition; instead of an enemy, an asset.

In life, there are those who view people as assets, and those who view people as liabilities. Those who call for the mass deportation of 12 million people, even at the staggering cost of $100 billion dollars, see people as liabilities. Homeland Security currently views people as liabilities and threats so much that it is willing to disregard 39 laws protecting men, women, and animals in order to rush the construction of the border wall. Nativistic dialogue from xenophobic showman highlight the worst in us humans, while neglecting to show the millions of individuals committed both to their family and this country.

We must recognize that every person is an asset to our nation if this is truly to become a fully-integrated Beloved Community. As a teacher and a nonviolent social activist, I must look at people and see their potential for goodness rather than their capacity for evil. In the end, everyone’s a nopale – it simply depends on how we look at them.

The Difference between the Dalai Lama and a Satyagrahi

 

    After 68 years of leading the Tibetan people from his place of exile, the Dalai Lama is the “most seasoned ruler on the planet.” A recent article in Time magazine entitled “A Monk’s Struggle” details the Dalai Lama’s life and his current struggles to free his government from Chinese rule. Though he he has campaigned the world over and is a popular dignitary at universities, capitols, conferences, and celebrations, he hasn’t managed to make significant progress in the past 50 years – “98% of Tibetans have no access to their leader and are denied the most basic of freedoms.”

    To analyze the Dalai Lama’s philosophy and strategy is to explore the fundamental difference between pacifism and nonviolence. Both pacifism and nonviolence are based on the same idea of interconnectedness. “China and Tibet will long be geographic neighbors,” the Dalai Lama intimates, “so for Tibetans to think of the Chinese as their enemies – or vice versa – is to say they will long be surrounded by enemies. Better by far to expunge the notion of “enmities” that the mind has created” (Iyer, Pico. “A Monk’s Struggle, p. 48). A Hindu leader in the country which now protects the Dalai Lama once phrased this same idea by saying, “In the dictionary of the non-violent there is no such word as an external enemy. But even for the supposed enemy he will have nothing but compassion in his heart” [Gandhi, Mohandas. Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha)]. An ocean away from both these men, a young pastor was preaching much the same idea around 1959, the year the Dalai Lama was first exiled. He said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly” (King, Martin Luther. Why We Can’t Wait).

    Although based on the same idea of life’s interconnectedness, there is a world of difference between a Satyagrahi and a pacifist. A pacifist looks at the idea of human interconnectedness and concludes that nothing he/she can do could better the situation. The choice of a pacifist is to withdraw support from such a system, hoping that their single vote will eventually cause the aggressor or oppressor to yield to reason. However, the pacifists’ viewpoint does not take life’s “network of mutuality” to its natural conclusion. If all life is connected, then “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere;” the oppressor is living in an unjust world every bit as much as the oppressed. Gandhi maintains that a victory for Justice is a victory for everyone involved, though at first the oppressor might not view it as such. A pacifist, then, sees the interconnectedness of life and asserts that he/she must remove themselves from the circle of action; the nonviolent Satyagrahi sees the interconnectedness and realizes that he/she must impact Justice for the good of the world.

    Pacifism has long been attacked as “passivism,” and too often nonviolence has been lumped in as well because of its similar aversion to violence. Nonviolence, however, is a pro-active response rather than an acquiescence. Nonviolence is diametrically difference than “not violence” – it chooses pro-active methods such as boycotts, sit-ins, marches, freedom rides, etc, to prick the conscience of its oppressor and anyone watching. There is nothing passive about nonviolence.

    As Dr. King wrote in Why We Can’t Wait, “Fortunately, history does not pose problems without eventually producing solutions….Nonviolent action, the Negro saw, was the way to supplement – not replace – the process of change through legal recourse. It was the way to divest himself of passivity without arraying himself in vindictive force…” (36) The beauty of nonviolence is that it offers a a third way; instead of self-defeating violence or an acquiescence condoning evil and injustice, nonviolence offers a way to save the oppressed from cynicism or inaction and provides a means for redemption for the oppressor. I pray, indeed the whole world prays, that Tibetans and other oppressed peoples throughout the world will be able to bring about Justice through positive, nonviolent means; the Justice of us all depends on their choice today.

Speech for an Education Club at UT-Brownsville

    I was asked to come speak here tonight on the No Border Wall Walk, issues of immigration, and my occupation educating high-school ESL students. As an English teacher, it is always heartening to find a common theme, and there most certainly is a vein running through all of these somewhat disparate topics. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way in his essay “Loving your Enemies”:

An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy. Each of us has something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves. A persistent civil war rages within all of our lives…This simply means that there is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies. When we look beneath the surface, beneath. the impulsive evil deed, we see within our enemy-neighbor a measure of goodness and know that the viciousness and evilness of his acts are not quite representative of all that he is. We see him in a new light. We recognize that his hate grows out of fear, pride, ignorance, prejudice, and misunderstanding…”

The concept that man is innately good and will do good if educated, encouraged, and allowed to do so by law – this concept shapes my hopes and my dreams and demands my participation in immigration, education, and nonviolent demonstrations such as the No Border Wall Walk.

 

    Unlike many teachers, I had not always dreamed of being a teacher. True, I had excellent teachers and mentors who shaped my young life, but I always thought they had shaped me to be a writer, an artist. It wasn’t until I actually set out to be a freelance writer in New York City that I realized the hard truth – not only was it next to impossible to get a job without first having a job, it also would bore me to death to stare only at words all day long. So, I applied to Teach For America and was accepted to teach English in the Rio Grande Valley.

    At this point, my audience must know that one of my favorite verses comes in Esther 4:14, “…And who knows but that you have come to [this] position for such a time as this?” That is precisely how I felt, coming to Brownsville, Texas, the poorest city in the United States, just as the Secure Fence Act of 2006 was passed. Teaching English-as-a-Second-Language students caused me to experience firsthand the immigration process, the excruciatingly slow wait of approved immigrants awaiting their lottery number, the pained reality that for some families, to leave Brownsville would be to leave their loved ones, huddled just across the river.

    ESL education is my job, and I try hard to equip my students with the skills they need to be literate. My goal is for them to be able to mean what the write and write what they mean, but also to be discerning of any message they encounter. However, I also realize my job as a teacher is only one part educator. The role of mentor has been paramount to my students and to my job satisfaction.

    In an effort to impart the ideas of social activism and nonviolence, while also readying my students for college, we spent a 6-week grading period reading inspiring documents by King, Chavez, Gandhi, Thoreau. Every 6-week marking period, students are required to internalize this spirit of volunteerism and community service. Because I feel most people are just waiting for an excuse to do good, it is easy for me to ask this of my students. And most of them have responded with impressive results. Many students attended school-sponsored service outings to the Gladys Porter Zoo, Sabal Palms Audobon Sanctuary, Boca Chica Beach, and Vermillion Elementary School. Some students even invented their own good turns, from mowing lawns and babysitting to cutting hair and painting a house.

 

    Teaching also excited my passion for immigration issues. Over the years teaching ESL students and other recent immigrants, I have become a staunch advocate of compassionate, comprehensive immigration reform. Instead of a border wall of any thickness or design, our nation and the globalized world need the United States to lead with progressive immigration legislation which decriminalizes immigrants, vastly remodels or replaces the current quota system, and which allows current residents viable means to earned citizenship.

    This passion for immigration puts me at odds with the border wall, for moral issues as well as social, economic, and environmental ones. Because I feel that people are good but sometimes make wrong decisions, I feel that liberalizing immigration reform would allow both American citizens and the 12 million extralegal Americalmosts a chance to do “good” by immigration. Given the opportunity and the hope, would-be immigrants would try the legal means which have previously been denied or delayed them. Given the right laws, Americans could welcome immigrants and refugees with open arms into our diversifying communities, our flagging economy, and our cultural melange.

 

    And that is what finally brings me to espouse nonviolence as the proper and only means of advocating against the border wall and for immigrants and the border region. Nonviolent demonstrations, unlike any other form of protest or persuasion, allows both sides of a conflict the opportunity to live up to their absolute best. The nonviolent protester advocates in a way that encourages goodness, and the opposing groups are challenged to compromise and/or amend their thinking to the “more excellent way” (1 Corinthians 12:31 NIV).

    There are thousands of people in these United States simply waiting to speak out and leave behind the silent majority. Dr King wrote in his Autobiography that, “The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people,” and there are countless Americans stateside and abroad who are trying to end the tragedy. “There is no force more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” This Victor Hugo quotation which Dr. King riffed on many a speech sums up the importance of my life philosophy. The time for immigration reform has come, the need for nonviolent protests is readily apparent, and the necessity to educate our youth “in the ways they should go” (Psalm 32:8 NIV) – all these are upon us.

    Let us work diligently under the assumption that our brothers and sisters are simply waiting for the right opportunity to act on the good. Perfect love, the kind that drives out fear, is necessary to be successful in life’s meaningful endeavors. As former SNCC Chairman and current Congressman John Lewis writes in Walking with the Wind,

It is a love that accepts and embraces the hateful and the hurtful. It is a love that recognizes the spark of the divine in each of us, even in those who would raise their hand against us, those we might call our enemy. This sense of love realizes that emotions of the moment and constantly shifting circumstances can cloud that divine spark. Pain, ugliness, and fear can cover it over, turning a person toward anger and hate. It is the ability to see through those layers of ugliness, to see further into a person than perhaps that person can see into himself, that is essential to the practice of nonviolence. (76)

May “perfect love drive out fear” as in 1 John 4:18, and may everyone begin to work towards their ideals with the inspiring epiphany that all men are not only created equal, but also good. For extralegal immigrants and multi-generational citizens, Christians and agnostics, Republicans and Democrats, all we need is the chance.