Migrant Deaths, Where is The News?

This is my husband's tractor. It has a cutter bar for hay attached to the back. It has been raining for most of the past few weeks, so the tractor sits idle, and the hay grows.

We are so lucky to have the lives we do, to have roots, to have established families. Sometimes I feel trapped by that. 

I have not written for six months, because I arranged to have my hot spot home internet turned off, and switched phone companies from Verizon to Credo. Making blog posts from a tablet is difficult. Home internet is now back on, and this is where things are.

The past two weeks have brought quite a lot of news and activity. Most notably in my mind and world, there were shootings in Mexico of two different groups of immigrants, amounting to around 210 people. Only about 60 escaped for sure. Joel Smith, whom I have mentioned in previous posts during my trip to the border in November of 2013 posted that he had heard about the shootings when he was in Sasabe, Mexico. He goes to Sasabe when he fills the water stations in the desert on the Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge, the run I went on when I was there. Joel was the first to post an article on the shootings. There have only been three articles, one in Spanish, and no other news: 

El Daily Post
telesur
El Diario

I remembered that he had posted that morning before leaving. Arizona is three hours behind Ohio. I leave for work around 8:30 am, and he was online before I left. That was 5:30 their time. 

Last week, I flew to Texas for training for my job. In April, I left my nursing career, and began a position as a medical copy editor. More specifically, I annotate advertisements that need to comply with FDA requirements for health care products. This requires reading numerous research papers, and matching pieces of them to advertisement claims. 

In between locations, and in between work days, I read a little in two books on my Kindle. They were "The Postmistress," by Sarah Blake, and "Enrique's Journey," by Sonia Nazario. Upon arriving home, I was overly sensitive to any racism against the Hispanic community. Okay, I was oversensitive to any racism at all. 

This morning, a fellow Friend (Quaker) posted a long journalism story on two wetsuitmen found on the coasts of Norway, and of the Netherlands. The investigation into the deaths led back to "The Jungle" refugee camp in Calais across the Dover Strait from Great Britain. Combine that with an online acquaintance from a breastfeeding forum 9 years ago who lives in Australia, posting about the refugees from Indonesia and Manus Island. Add in the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya. The global migration problem becomes much more ominous when one combines all of these places. 1 in 122 people in the world today lives with no country. Private prisons have become a for-profit industry, and the military industrial complex profits have probably never been better. 

In two weeks, I will travel to Frederick, Maryland to give a slideshow on the trip the border two Novembers ago. I hope to stop off at Harper's Ferry, where distant cousins, Edwin and Barclay Coppock participated in John Brown's Raid before the Civil War. There were protests in Frederick County two months ago, after the death of Freddie Gray. This was around the time I began my new job. Whether people are African American, Muslim or Hispanic, police and border patrol brutality against the "other" happens increasingly with impunity. It is justified by much of the public, and it should not be. A couple of days ago, a young man shot and killed 9 people in a church service in South Carolina. A large portion of the news media is attempting to state that this was not racially motivated. 

Meanwhile, our local school district continues on with the mascot of a "Big Red" Indian in full regalia, whilst complaining that the local school levy will not pass after 6 times on the ballot. I have been told it would be too expensive to change the mascot, but no attempt has been made to phase out the emblem to ease such a change down the road. Entitlement and selfishness are the primary accusations against the public for not passing the levy. Most in the local community are unable to make any connection between entitlement, privilege, and the use of a Native American symbol to embody their team and local identity. Even as they pretend to be "Indians," many decry the invasion of "illegal immigrants," not understanding that it is they who are illegal; or that the ancestors of this area committed genetic cleansing against the mascot they pretend to be.

I do not think we can afford any sort of racism right now. None. We cannot afford to criminalize refugee status of the country-less. If we continue down such a path, what will our world look like in 5, 10, and 20 years from now? The population of the world is growing. Borders are breaking at the seams of the "haves," and the "have nots" are pouring in. All of the evidence base on what works is being tossed out with the garbage, and profit is the primary motivation for how we address these issues. More prisons, more walls, more drones, more tanks, more bombs. It is not difficult, given these scenarios, to understand what the world might be like in the future, and it is not pretty. It is high time to become humane.