Will you be ready?
Instead of adding interesting places to my travel list, I am slowly taking places away. Arizona and the reaches of the Grand Canyon were once a dream excursion. I am boycotting the dusty hills, now marred by a clumsily orchestrated piece of anti-immigration legislation. The idea of “reasonable suspicion” is farcical. It is an artful legal contraption—semantics, a simple proxy for racial profiling. They find “reasonable suspicion” the same way they find “reasonable suspicion” the stop, beat and humiliate black and Latino men in NY (see recent Times report). They, those foreigners, those brown people crossing over the border, are us.
I’ve also crossed out a visit to Israel on my list “100 things to do before I die.” I once longed to walk the cobble-stoned streets of the holy land and trace the steps of Jesus. But not any longer. What has been happening there for years, in the West Bank, is unholy. Every day I hear of a new settlement built or a new restriction placed on the people of Palestine, I am overwhelmed with sorrow. It is apartheid and American South Jim Crow all over again. They, the brown people of Palestine, trying to hold on to their home, are us.
I fear my contact with this life, this world, has been so precarious that I am closing unto myself like the mimosa. I once believed, somewhere, that people could be changed. I believed that if you greeted people with honesty and respect you would be treated accordingly. History has taught me otherwise.
It is utterly unnerving to know that I am invisible and horribly visible simultaneously. It is tiring trying to explain, assuage irrational fears-- to arrive, everyday, as whole and unstirred. I am giving up the act of normalcy. I am what I am. When they come for me, they won’t have to look far. I'll be ready.
I’ve also crossed out a visit to Israel on my list “100 things to do before I die.” I once longed to walk the cobble-stoned streets of the holy land and trace the steps of Jesus. But not any longer. What has been happening there for years, in the West Bank, is unholy. Every day I hear of a new settlement built or a new restriction placed on the people of Palestine, I am overwhelmed with sorrow. It is apartheid and American South Jim Crow all over again. They, the brown people of Palestine, trying to hold on to their home, are us.
I fear my contact with this life, this world, has been so precarious that I am closing unto myself like the mimosa. I once believed, somewhere, that people could be changed. I believed that if you greeted people with honesty and respect you would be treated accordingly. History has taught me otherwise.
It is utterly unnerving to know that I am invisible and horribly visible simultaneously. It is tiring trying to explain, assuage irrational fears-- to arrive, everyday, as whole and unstirred. I am giving up the act of normalcy. I am what I am. When they come for me, they won’t have to look far. I'll be ready.
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