Honduran refugees
Friday
A friend (Kathy Hamman) alerted me to this poem by by pseudonymously-named Brian Bilston, which is a must-read as self-proclaimed “nationalist” Donald Trump whips up anti-immigrant hysteria against Honduran refugees. You’ll understand why Bilston has been described as “the poet laureate of twitter” after you read the poem twice—once from beginning to end and the other from end to beginning.
Refugees
They have no need of our help
So do not tell me
These haggard faces could belong to you or me
Should life have dealt a different hand
We need to see them for who they really are
Chancers and scroungers
Layabouts and loungers
With bombs up their sleeves
Cut-throats and thieves
They are not
Welcome here
We should make them
Go back to where they came from
They cannot
Share our food
Share our homes
Share our countries
Instead let us
Build a wall to keep them out
It is not okay to say
These are people just like us
A place should only belong to those who are born there
Do not be so stupid to think that
The world can be looked at another way
(now read from bottom to top)
The poem is an embodiment of our split between Trump reality and facts-based reality. Apparently it takes only the slimmest of threads–a shift of perspective–to turn a few desperate refugees into a national emergency. For the record, it is legal for people to present themselves at the border and apply for asylum in the United States.
Anyone promoting or enabling Trump’s hysteria is contemptible.
Further thought: In a strange way, Trump hyping the caravan as a crisis resembles Leslie Marmon Silko’s apocalyptic vision in the magical realist novel Almanac of the Dead. Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko envisions thousands of unstoppable women and children moving on the southern border, orchestrated by twin brothers instructed by birds. As Silko sees it, the white invasion of the Americas was only a blip, and people of color will ultimately inherit the Western Hemisphere:
What would these people in Albuquerque do when they heard about the twin brothers and their followers? How would the Native Americans and Mexican Americans in New Mexico react when the U.S. military opened fire on the twin brothers and thousands of their followers, mostly women and children? How many of these Chicanos and these Indians had ever heard the old stories? Did they know the ancient prophecies? It all seemed quite impossible, and yet one only had to look as far as Africa to see that after more than five hundred years of suffering, slavery and bloodshed, the African people had taken back the continent from European invaders. Sterling shuddered when he remembered the terrible price the tribal people of South Africa had had to pay while the nations of the world had stood back and watched.
Silko’s bloody hope is the white nationalists’ nightmare. Those of us who think in shorter timeframes recommend humanity, common sense, and smarter foreign policy.
