In summer, mesquite pods and Saguaro fruit husks cover the Sonoran desert floor. Symbols of desert fecundity, they even litter city and suburban yards where locals tend these native plants. You can read about this special season in Tessa’s post from two years ago when we harvested Saguaro fruit, guided by some Tohono O’odham neighbors.
Living near the border that transects ancient Tohono O’odham homeland also makes us aware of the effects of borders in our world.
My Itinerant Preaching
From the altar, I look out on thriving congregations. At communion, I hand out consecrated hosts to wizened elders, place the Body of Christ in farm workers’ callused hands, on the tongues of tired mothers carrying infants, and in the small soft hands of school kids, some bold, others shy.
These families may come to mass in fear of being abducted by masked men without warrants or identification when they enter or exit the church. Catholic bishops in Nashville, Tennessee and San Bernardino, California have given permission for parishioners to skip mass if it puts them at risk. How can this be?
Necropolitics and Day Camp Raids
Mbembe recounts, for example, the history of concentration camps. They existed long before the Nazis transformed them into death camps. And they’re making a comeback, as Europe impounds shipwrecked immigrants, Israel proposes a “Humanitarian City” in Gaza that has all the amenities of a prison, and Florida hosts Alligator Alcatraz, where politicians chuckle over how tricky it is to outrun a gator.
I mentioned in a recent post how democracy, for a time, tempered capitalism’s most ruthless traits. But now the gloves are off, we embrace deregulation, dismantle the government, kill USAID, multiply the ICE and Pentagon budgets, and syphon off what little is left of working peoples’ income and benefits such as SNAP and Medicaid. Medicaid cuts may kill 50,000 of us, and the USAID shutdown may kill 14 million people worldwide.
We send armored vehicles and mounted police into Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park to terrify kids at a day camp. Border Patrol El Centro sector chief Gregory Bovino warns, “Better get used to us now, ’cause this is going to be normal very soon.” As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat puts it, having deregulated corporations, we moved on to moral deregulation.
Genocide is Profitable
While Israel’s genocide has devastated Palestinian lives and landscapes, the Tel Aviv stock exchange soared by 213 percent (USD), amassing $225.7 billion in market gains—including $67.8 billion in the past month alone. For some, genocide is profitable.
For decades, “fully aware of and yet indifferent to, decades of human rights violations and international crimes,” Albanese reports, corporations have “scaffolded” repression of the Palestinian people. The result: 85,000 tons of bombs dropped on Gaza. That adds up to the equivalent of six Hiroshima bombings. And, as we’ve seen, parents gather fragments of what were once their children.
The United States believes that this ethnic cleansing qualifies as legitimate self-defense and the exercise of sovereignty. Our Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, alleges that Albanese has launched a “campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel.” Thank goodness she has no F-35s.
So What’s the Good News?
That shock rocks the body politic in concrete ways spelled out, for example, in the Poor People’s Campaign’s moral agenda and jubilee platform.
The Face of a New Humanity
We may love our roots, but we are also made to explore. In free movement from place to place, we encounter others and their languages, cultures, and religions. We needn’t sell them our religion, take their land, and send them to camps. We may make friends.
Mbembe aims to “convoke … the figure of a human out to make great strides up a steep path–who has left, quit his country, lived elsewhere, abroad, in places in which he forges an authentic dwelling, thereby tying his fate to those who welcome and recognize their own face in his, the face of a humanity to come” (187).
Finally, I take heart from Dorothy Day’s application of St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s Little Way. As we face monumental injustices and appalling violence, Thérèse reminds us that no act is too small, so we have no excuse to be idle:
What we do is very little but it is like the little boy with a few loaves and fishes. Christ took that little and increased it. He will do the rest. What we do is so little we may seem to be constantly failing. But so did he fail. He met with apparent failure on the Cross. But unless the seed fall into the earth and die, there is no harvest. And why must we see results? Our work is to sow.
I mention this tale of fish and bread when I speak to immigrants. I tell them that I hesitate to ask them to help support Cross Catholic Outreach’s relief and development projects because I know these hard-working families already send remittances back to their families abroad. They climb a very steep path and still they give. And I’m a lucky guy. I get to see the faces of Mbembe’s “humanity to come.” They are already here. How dare we reject them?
Beautiful and thought-provoking, Dave. Love your benediction, too:
“May Our Lady of Mount Carmel release a monsoon of kindness into our thirsty world.”
Indeed….