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.

Bring me your Tired, Dame Sus Pobres

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”

 

    Emma Lazarus put these words on the base of the Statue of Liberty in 1903, years before it would become the beacon of hope which drew over 12 million immigrants to Ellis Island. Despite the fact that Lady Liberty and Ellis Island are now only museums, 12 million men, women, and children today are within our borders, floating on the sea of insecurity that comes without papers. They came from war-ravaged lands, they came to give their children hope, they overstayed visas in attempts to get a job deserving of their education, they came to work menial manual labor jobs because it represented the first rung on the Ladder of American Dreams. They came because they heard Emma Lazarus’s words in their own language, calling them to come to the United States.

 

    The sad thing, though, is that too many corrupt individuals are also voicing these words. Coyotes on our southern border are whispering “Dame sus Cansados, dame sus Pobres.” Too many American employers send recruiters to equate the American promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” with the underpaid, overworked conditions in their factories and fields. Countless individuals without scruples see these people without papers as easy targets for bribery, coercion, and corruption.

 

    A headline in the Brownsville Herald yesterday stated that over 20 immigrants were hurled from the back of a pickup truck in an accident on March 27 near La Joya, Texas. Three men and women were killed when the F-150 wrecked. The driver, as usual, fled the scene and is probably whispering his smuggler’s promises to a new batch of hopeful Americalmosts.

 

    It is vital that our nation begin to shift its treatment of extralegal immigrants from one of a “lawbreaker” to one of “victim.” The same shift happened in the American Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King did not overcome segregation despite his jail sentences; John Lewis did not lead students to prisons across the South by accident. No, the breaking of these unjust laws was vital to the Civil Rights Movement because it highlighted the fact that these men and women were victims not violent criminals. As Thoreau so eloquently wrote back in 1849, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison” (Civil Disobedience). If virtuous men and women are being punished for living on the other side of a law, the American public must come to the realization that this law must be changed.

    Extralegal residents, and those who might currently be contemplating a risky transaction with a coyote smuggler because the waiting list for citizenship is 10 years long and growing, do not break the law because they have no respect for America, no respect for the Border Patrol or our polices, no respect for our way of life. In fact, they are coming to America precisely because they honor these traditions and institutions of ours. No, if and when they break laws in order to become residents of this great nation, they are doing it only because they cannot recognize the validity, Justice, or Morality of a broken immigration system.

    We must push our nation’s leaders to return to the Table of Immigration Reform which they were seated at two years ago. We must charge them to strike the Secure Fence Act, the only piece of legislation to emerge from those talks. We must call for them to dialogue seriously about real immigration reform so there will be no more immigrants thrown from the backs of pickup trucks, no more residents coerced into corruption in hopes of a green card, no more victims at the hands of our unresponsive immigration laws. The time for change must be now – it is far too late to dismantle Lady Liberty and that poem on which she stands.

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.

Unjust Laws Create Both Criminals and Victims

A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.” (Why We Can’t Wait 82)

    Martin Luther King’s differentiation of just and unjust laws was used in the civil rights movement to condone the breaking of Jim Crow laws which were perpetuating immoral segregation. Our nation’s current immigration laws, which themselves hinder real integration for at least 4% of our resident population. Just as in the civil rights movement and today’s unresponsive immigration laws, unjust legislation creates criminals out of moral men and women.

    Another important distinction, however, is that unjust laws create victims and victimizers. With more than 12 million people currently living on the other side of our nation’s immigration laws, more than half of whom have just overstayed visas, corruption and victimization are rampant. A New York Times article which ran yesterday detailed the sad story of several women who have been subjected to rape and sexual assault in hopes of procuring the ever-elusive Green Card. Nina Bernstein writes, “..it raises broader questions about the system’s vulnerability to corruption at a time when millions of noncitizens live in a kind of legal no-man’s land, increasingly fearful of seeking the law’s protection.” (Bernstein, Nina “An Agent, A Green Card, and a Demand for Sex” New York Times: Mar. 21, 2008. ) The chilling reality is that these sobering tales of corruption in low-level immigration positions belie the thousands and potentially millions of similar stories where people without rights, recourse, and protection of the law are taken advantage of by citizens, most of whom are legal through no merit beyond their birthplace.

    Gone unchecked, this long victimization of immigrants has been below the national radar. With nativists calling for massive deportation, which would run upwards of $94 billion and shock jocks emphasizing the few extralegal residents who break other laws, the American public has been unaware of the power game going on in immigration agencies, businesses which hire undocumented workers, and in the hearts of normal people who are tempted to profit from the precarious position of these extralegal residents. Bernstein notes that,

Money, not sex, is the more common currency of corruption in immigration, but according to Congressional testimony in 2006 by Michael Maxwell, former director of the agency’s internal investigations, more than 3,000 backlogged complaints of employee misconduct had gone uninvestigated for lack of staff, including 528 involving criminal allegations. (Bernstein, Nina “An Agent, A Green Card, and a Demand for Sex” New York Times: Mar. 21, 2008. )

Because unjust laws fly in the face of a higher law, they make a mockery of the Justice which laws are designed to approximate. As a result, the “criminals” created by unjust laws become helpless victims and law-abiding citizens are tempted to use the law to their advantage. Victimized and victim become dehumanized because, as Dr. King stated, unjust laws degrade human personality and make us tend toward the worst in human potential.

    At the risk of alienating some of my Christian brothers and sisters, the parallels between abortion legislation and immigration legislation are haunting and worthy of note. There are two reasons why many Christians, like the revered evangelical author Jim Wallis, are opposed to absolutely overturning Roe v. Wade: 1.) because when abortion becomes illegal, unsafe, makeshift clinics would instantly pop up and endanger the lives of thousands of women; 2.) to ban abortion while not simultaneously increasing welfare and child-care programs would be to sentence these children and their mothers to a bleak future. The main problem with overturning Roe v. Wade, then, would be the resulting victims and victimizers. Jim Wallis, along with many Christians, advocate a pro-life instead of pro-birth stance, by trying to rid the underlying causes of abortion. A simple scan of countries where abortion is illegal, such as Mexico, shows that instead of ending abortion these laws simply mar human rights by making the practice more dangerous and lethal.

    In much the same way, unjust immigration laws like a quota system based on national origin and a lottery system based on mere chance create victims and victimizers. Our country must strive for comprehensive immigration reform so that our laws uplift human personality by granting immigrants and their native neighbors every opportunity to realize their full potential.

A Strange Saint Patrick’s Day

    This St. Patrick’s Day is markedly different than all others past. I came to school today not clad in traditional green, but wearing overalls and a plain white t-shirt. Ringing in my ears were not the Gaelic jigs and Celtic reels but rather the worker chants and the pro-immigrant songs we sang over the past nine days’ march from Roma to Brownsville. I thought less today about the military Molly Maguire’s and their violent fight for worker’s rights and instead meditated on Cesar Chavez’s fasts for his people and Martin Luther King’s words of empowerment and hope. Today was less about nationalism and more about opposing nativism, less about drinking beer and more about living in such a way as to forward the cause of the immigrant, wherever he or she may originate.

    My great-great grandparents came from County Mayo, Sligo, and County Cork. They came to escape the ravages of the potato blight and the resulting famines. They came seeking a better life, and they found it buried deep in the coal mines of Pennsylvania. Towns like Carbondale and Mauch Chunk welcomed them and buried them in their strip-mined hillsides. But, as is always the case with immigrants, they managed to survive and hew out a life for themselves in this America they helped create.

    It was their backs that fed coal into the iron-horses which shrank this vast country into a two-day trip. It was their leadership and collective bargaining powers which scared groups like the Know-Nothings, the first political party formed with the aim of opposing a specific immigrant group. They were able to overcome religious persecution, employer discrimination, and widespread xenophobia to become rightful heirs of the American dream.

 

    This past week, walking alongside many Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, I was reminded of the Batalia de San Patricio, the group of Irish soldiers who defected to the Mexican Army during the Mexican-American War. There was and is so many similarities between those Irish immigrants of yesteryear and the immigrants of today. Both groups rely heavily on their faith in a God who champions the cause of the poor and the sojourner. Both of these immigrants focus on family values and a strong work ethic. Both the Irish of the late 1800s and the Mexicans of the early 21^st century are immigrant groups which are being slandered for their desire to come to this land for a better life. News about both of these groups has centered on an “invasion” or any number of natural disaster metaphors such as “flood of immigrants,” “drain on the economy,” and “wave after wave of workers.” None of these nativist metaphors are new – no, they have been around since people first started emigrating to new lands. It is this brand of hateful rhetoric that spurred the command in Leviticus 19:34, “The stranger who sojourns with you shall be as the native among you, and you shall love the stranger as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

 

 

    As I teach my class today, I am standing in front of them not as a college graduate, a son of Pennsylvania, a Texas-certified teacher, or a social activist. I stand before them in overalls and my walking shoes as the son of immigrants. There is a solidarity here which we must not deny. I do not believe in otherness; if we believe that every man, woman, and child bears the indelible image of God and the spark of the divine, we can never separate ourselves from one another. We are inextricably caught up in an “inescapable network of mutuality, tied up in a single garment of destiny,” and that means that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” As King also stated, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter;” this happens for the sheer fact that in not speaking up for the rights of others we are not speaking up for the rights of ourselves and future generations.

    To all those immigrants, past, present and future, I impart this traditional Irish blessing: “Céad míle fáilte romhat!” or “A hundred thousand welcomes to you.”