mother of exiles?
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Except no more. No more the “mother of exiles.” No more a world-wide welcome. The lamp has been set down and the gates closed. If you are from Syria or Iran or Libya or Yemen or Iraq or Somalia or Sudan – stay away! We don’t want you! We won’t welcome you!
We are not turning away terrorists. We are turning away their victims. And we are betraying our nation’s heritage.
We need to speak up. We need to object. We need to say: “This is not who we are!”
You can start by visiting the website of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.
OUR VISION
Immigrants, refugees, and uprooted people will live dignified lives with
their rights respected and protected in communities of opportunity.OUR MISSION
To protect the rights and address the needs of persons in forced or
voluntary migration worldwide and support their transition to a dignified life.
fire with fire?
Trump on waterboarding: ‘We have to fight fire with fire’
When you fight fire with fire, that’s what you get: more fire. When you fight fire with fire, you are no different than your enemy. When you counter something immoral with something immoral, you are immoral. This is not a partisan issue. This is a moral issue. Torture is NEVER the right thing to do. Torture is a betrayal of everything we claim as a nation to stand for: justice, certain inalienable human rights, and the rule of law.
If you agree, add your name to the petition: Torture is not an American value.
Torture harms not only those who are tortured; it also damages the souls of those who torture and of those who turn aside and allow people to be tortured.
In 2015, a new law authored by Senators John McCain & Dianne Feinstein and passed by Congress permanently banned the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding and sexual humiliation, that were part of the CIA’s torture program.
We call upon President Trump and his Administration to follow U.S. law and common decency by respecting the dignity and worth of each human being and rejecting torture in every way.
holding on to hope and compassion
A New Year’s reflection from Rachel Held Evans: 2016 and the Risk of Birth
An excerpt …
For me, the dissonance of this strange year is compounded by the fact that motherhood turned my bleeding heart into a hemorrhage. It’s as though I’ve become porous, my skin absorbing the pain of others, particularly other mamas and babies. (Speaking of which, why did all the good shows this year involve children in peril? I’m looking at you, “Stranger Things”!) Every night, as I nurse my boy in that cozy armchair in his nursery, I think of the Syrian mama nursing her baby in a raft adrift in the Mediterranean Sea. I think of the shell-shocked boy from Aleppo. I think of how every Latino kid taunted by classmates, every soldier sent to war, every autistic kid who will lose his therapy when ACA is repealed, every black man shot by police is somebody else’s baby boy, somebody else’s most important person in the world. I still, almost every day, think of Sandy Hook.
“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin,” writes Frederick Buechner. “It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.”
Motherhood invited me into other people’s skin in a way I’ve never experienced before. So my joy is big and real and consuming, but also incomplete. I am overwhelmed by the conviction that every mother should be able to feed her baby like this, in safety and contentedness, and I am haunted by the reality that this is still far from the case.
In 2016, I became more aware than ever of the darkness around us, and more invested than ever in lighting the path.
eight people?
A link to a new Oxfam report: “Just 8 people now have the same wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion”.
This is not right. There are no explanations or caveats or excuses that can make this right. But it is not the fault of eight people. It is our fault. It is our fault for letting such a world exist and for not questioning and not challenging the systems that allow such a world to exist.