Disappearances, Complicity, and Absolution

Nothing light today. Maybe lightness will come with the writing.

A student at my daughter’s old high school is supposed to walk in graduation this week. Instead, she is in Guatemala, a week after ICE picked her up and sent her to detention in Louisiana.

This is disappearance. Not deportation or, more clinically, “removal.” This young woman was in our community, and she disappeared from it. Disappeared by forces that don’t reckon with humanity, that don’t see or appreciate the tapestry of community and care.

And the disappearances are happening everywhere. Being who I am, people tend to tell me about disappearances. The ones that don’t make the news. I try to help, mostly I can’t.

The rule of law still exists in important critical ways that still have the capacity to keep democracy, writ large, alive. But the rule of law is vanishing in places beyond the headlines. While it was never strong in immigration, we had tools that could help. At a time when the needs are exponentially larger, the tools themselves are diminished. Not gone. But diminished. I could write a hundred essays just about that, but I won’t (not now, not yet) so you’ll just have to trust me on this.

It has all gotten me thinking, almost daily, about the lives and choices of everyday people in 1930s Germany. Where did they find space to be as moral as their world allowed? What did they do and think and feel as the world destroyed any capacity to be moral? I know many left and many more ended up dead in camps. But many, many adjusted themselves to living in a world where being moral was no longer possible.

We are not quite there as a country, but I hunger for examples because it feels so perilously close. And as someone trained with the skills to be doing more than I currently am, I grapple basically daily with what it says about me to choose to spend my energy in different ways. I had reasons for stepping away from daily immigration practice, but those reasons feel so selfish—even when I know that adding me to the mix changes the overall calculus only infinitesimally. I am not doing nothing, but are the “somethings” I do enough? Welcome to my daily angst, but please don’t tell to out my own life jacket on first before helping others. I have worn out that metaphor. And there just aren’t enough life jackets.

Which, oddly, or not oddly at all, brings me to a line from Titanic. Forgive me, but I have certainly spent more than an entire day of my life watching that movie, all 2 hours and 78 minutes of it. And at the end, Molly Brown describes the survivors of the Titanic waiting for an absolution that would never come.

As the government disappears more of our classmates, neighbors, coworkers, friends, and family members, I feel like her sitting in the lifeboat listening to the cries of those in the water.

The only lightness I can summon is that so many people do care, are extending help, are providing funds for people to find lawyers, and are voicing their strong dissent. If anything will turn this ship from the iceberg, it is all of that goodness. And I cherish it. As I cherish sudden sunshine, watching my daughter weep at the theater, listening to my dog’s gentle snoring, laughing at my husband’s earnestly discussed poetry despite wearing a god-awful wig because it was a costume party. It is not all darkness. And the things we all cherish keep us strong and keep our humanity intact to come together for the bigger fights.

But some weeks, the darkness feels mighty.

Please send a prayer or love into the ether Wednesday when that child should be walking in bright red across the stage to get her diploma.