Of humanity and a memory.

elaelo | Deposit Photos

Here we are, the Sunday after Trump's second inauguration, and so of course all the preachers in all the churches in America are talking about it, in one way or another. A lot of them are talking about the homily delivered to Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance, on Inauguration Day at the National Cathedral by the Right Rev. Marian Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC. (For those who aren't clued into ecclesiastical stuff, the National Cathedral is an Episcopal church. That's a Protestant denomination. It's more or less the American version of the Anglican Church, which King Henry VIII created when the pope wouldn't grant him a divorce from his first wife.) The Rev. Budde had the temerity to call on Trump -- to his face, even! -- to "have mercy upon the people in this country who are scared now." How dare she, right? A priest calling on a parishoner to do the right, moral thing! The very idea!

The reactions fell into the usual camps, with Trump and his MAGAts attacking her. One Republican member of the House of Representatives suggested that she be added to the deportation list. Where does he think she should be deported to? She was born in New Jersey!

Pope Francis is siding with the Rev. Budde, at least on the issue of mass deportations. He's calling the plan "a disgrace". So of course the MAGAts are mad at him, too.

None of this stopped ICE from rounding up migrants -- some of them legal -- working at a fish market in Newark, NJ, on Friday. According to Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, one of those rounded up was a veteran who had his military service questioned -- an "indignity", the mayor said. And how.

We knew this was going to happen, and worse. Trump and his minions are not interested in showing anybody mercy, least of all nonwhite, noncisgendered people. But make no mistake: They are all still people, no matter what. As an animist, I think it's a no-brainer: all humans are people (my definition of "people" is a lot broader than just humans, as alert hearth/myth readers know - here's just one of my several posts on the subject), and all people deserve dignity and respect.

Pace yourselves, guys. It's gonna be a long four years.

***

Let's talk about something more cheerful. This memory bubbled up in my brain when an author friend made a Facebook post in which he asked people to tell about the first single they ever bought. (In this context, "single" refers to a 45-rpm vinyl record, smaller than an LP, that had just one song on each side.)

I couldn't tell you which single I owned first. I mean, it was probably a Monkees record; I just don't remember which one. But I can tell you that virtually my entire hoard of singles came from one of two stores in my hometown: either Shoppers Fair or 212 Bargain Center. 

The name "212 Bargain Center" was not exactly creative: The store was located on Indiana Highway 212, a spur that connects US 12 and US 20. If you've ever read any of Andrew M. Greeley's early novels, you may have run across a mention of the highway; he would sometimes send his priests up to Grand Beach, MI, for a summer outing, and at least once, they stopped at Roxanne's Drive-In on Highway 212 for a bite.

Anyway. When I was a kid, Mom, Dad, and I had a tradition on Saturday nights: after we ate supper at home, we'd get in the car and do some shopping (either at one of those two stores or the mall), then maybe stop for milkshakes at McDonald's (which we consumed in the car -- no indoor seating, folks, this was the '60s), and then head to the South Shore train station on 11th Street downtown so Dad could buy the Sunday editions of the Chicago newspapers as soon as they came off the train Saturday night. 

Shoppers Fair often ran a coupon in their weekly advertising circular for singles -- 25 cents each, or four for a dollar. At 212 Bargain Center, you didn't need a coupon; they had a big bin of cut-out singles. Each of these 45s had a hole drilled through the label. They played fine, though, and most importantly, they were cheap. I could usually talk my mother into buying me one or two.

On this particular night, as I browsed the cut-out bin, I ran across a song I liked and asked Mom if we could get it. "Which song is that?" she asked. The house was small and I had my radio on a lot; she'd heard them all. Suddenly, the background music in the store played the record I was asking for. "That one," I said, and she said okay. Then I ran across another song I liked -- and the same thing happened. And then it happened again!

I don't remember how many records I ended up with. I only remember how surprised and delighted I was that the songs I wanted kept playing when Mom wanted to know what they sounded like.

Coincidence? Maybe. Somebody in the office at the store having fun with us? Doubtful. The office was pretty far from the record bin; they would have needed binoculars to see the record labels. A miracle? It's an odd sort of thing to put down as miraculous, don't you think? Serendipity, maybe. Or maybe ... magic.

***

These moments of magical blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there, guys.

The cost of border wars.

We're wrapping up a lovely, restful, four-day Thanksgiving weekend here at La Casa Cantwell. On Thursday, I made turkey with all the trimmings and we ate ourselves into oblivion. I've spent the rest of the time alternately working on the NaNo novel (the WIP is finished -- yay! -- but I have another 8,000-ish words to write before I can claim victory this year) and picking out decorations for the balcony that we didn't have last December but we do now.

As always, though, the respite is coming to a close. Some returns to reality are harsher than others, and this weekend's seems to be among the more brutal variety.

News reached us last week that a Christian missionary named John Allen Chau had broken the law by trying to land on North Sentinel Island off the coast of India and convert the members of the last pre-Neolithic tribe in the world. It's illegal to get within three nautical miles of the coastline. The regulation is there to protect both the Sentinelese and outsiders: Indian authorities fear that contact with modern people would transmit diseases that the tribal members have no immunity to, and the tribe itself has communicated its desire to be left alone -- its members shoot arrows at anyone who gets close.

Apparently none of that mattered to Chau, who was so bent on spreading the gospel to people who clearly didn't want to hear it that he paid some local fishermen to take him to the island. That was on November 14th. Chau reportedly spent two days shouting verses from Genesis at the islanders from a kayak. On the morning of the 17th -- just over a week ago -- the fishermen saw the Sentinelese dragging Chau's body along the beach. No one's seen him since. And the Indian authorities have been unable to retrieve the body because the Sentinelese won't let them onto the island.

Chau was 26 years old and a graduate of Oral Roberts University. By all accounts, he had his whole life in front of him. He told friends that he was willing to risk his life to bring Christianity to the Sentinelese. Looks like his God took him at his word.

Then this afternoon, word came from San Diego that U.S. border agents had fired tear gas on hundreds of migrants as they protested near the border between Mexico and the United States. More than 8,000 migrants from Central America are waiting in Baja California to cross, but processing has slowed to a crawl and the official border crossing was closed today because of the protest. While the march itself was peaceful, some of the migrants tried to breach the concertina wire at the border and others threw rocks at border personnel. That gave the agents the excuse they needed to open fire with tear gas. No one was reported hurt, and the border crossing has since been reopened.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the tear gas was used "because of the risk to agents' safety." Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said, "DHS will not tolerate this type of lawlessness."

Except the "lawlessness" was minor: Rock throwing.

On the surface, these two incidents are similar only in that they both involve defense of a border. But they rhyme for me in another way.

Here in the United States, we have prided ourselves for generations on being a haven for all those who have been oppressed -- and yet we have a history of suspicion and outright hatred of those who come to America from other lands. The Chinese and the Irish were among the first targets of distrust. Then it was the Japanese during World War Two. More recently it's been Muslims and anybody who's brown -- even Native Americans, which is particularly laughable when you realize that for them, whites are the interlopers.

And as for these latest waves of Central American migrants, they're coming here because the United States has long worked to destabilize the governments in their home countries. Why? Because it was helpful for U.S. companies doing business in Central America if dictators were in charge. We are responsible for the migrants' plight -- and now that they've come to us for sanctuary, we're turning them away.

This isn't a Democrat-vs.-Republican thing. The clandestine effort to stick our noses into Central American politics has been going on at least since the end of the Cold War. Administrations of both political parties have been complicit.

I'm ashamed at the way we've treated these people and at the way we continue to abuse them.

And that's where I see an intersection between the migrants at our border and the Sentinelese. John Chau had no thought for the people he wanted to convert beyond his own personal interest. Just as the United States has used the people of Central American as economic cannon fodder, Chau was determined to sacrifice the Sentinelese in service to his God -- even if it killed them.

May the gods forgive us for what we have done.

***
These moments of borderline blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

A Pagan perspective on splitting up migrant families.

I'm trying really, really hard not to turn this into a political post. Really hard. Because I said I wouldn't write about politics on this blog, and so far I haven't.  I've skated close to the edge a few times, but I haven't done it.

So let's talk about morality. Specifically, Pagan morality, and how it relates to what's going on at the borders of the United States right now.

I'm not going to talk much about Christianity in this post, tempting as it is to do so, what with U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions mentioning a Bible verse this past week as justification for coming down hard on undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. First, I'm not Christian, or not anymore, and I don't feel comfortable lecturing followers of other religions on whether they're doing it right. Second, over the past few days, I've read plenty of criticism of Sessions' comments by people much better versed in the Bible than I. So a Pagan spin on things it is.

First, a quick primer on Pagan morality. Basically, we have two...let's call them "words to the wise," shall we? Pagans aren't really into rules, and anyway these are more along the lines of "do this and karma will bite you in the ass."

1. The Wiccan Rede, which is best known in its pseudo-medieval phrasing: An it harm none, do as ye will. Translated into normal English, it means you may do whatever you want, unless your actions hurt someone.

2. The Rule of Three, also known as the Threefold Law, which states that whatever energy you put out into the world will come back to you threefold. Put out positive energy, and all will be sweetness and light. Put out negative energy, and see karma mentioned above.

With that in mind, here's a quick recap of recent events: The US government has begun implementing a zero-tolerance policy for undocumented immigrants, particularly those from Central and South America. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents seem to be using this as an excuse to act like the Gestapo, boarding buses far from any border and demanding that passengers prove they're in the country legally. But that's not all. In one recent case, ICE picked up a Mexican man who has been in America legally for 50 years because of a 2001 misdemeanor conviction whose sentence he had successfully completed.

Immigrants who apply for asylum are the latest football. Immigration attorneys say asylum seekers are being subjected to delay after delay, and in some cases the government is losing the background documentation that supports their claim.

Most recently, Border Patrol has begun splitting up families. Undocumented immigrants and those applying for asylum are being detained -- put in jail, in other words -- and their children are being housed elsewhere. Often in another state. The children are sometimes taken under false pretenses -- the parent is told the child is being taken away to have a bath -- and hours later, the parent discovers the child is gone. I've seen one estimate that the government is holding two thousand migrant children whose parents have been detained.

Anyone with an ounce of humanity would agree that this is inhumane. And a whole bunch of people -- me included -- have said this is not what America stands for. We're better than this, aren't we? After all, we've never incarcerated people based on their race before, have we?

Oh, wait. There was that time during World War II when we put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.

But we've never split up families this way before, have we? Taken children away from their parents so callously?

Um, well, yeah, we have. I'm sure you've heard of slavery. And then there was the practice of stealing Native American children away from their families so they could be sent to boarding school and have the Indian "educated" out of them, one way or another.

What all these horrific actions have in common is the belief that the "other" is not quite human. White Americans believed Indians were savages and slaves were stupid. Japanese-Americans were suspected of being spies. And now, a lot of people believe that Hispanics are rapists and murderers and members of MS-13, or here to steal our jobs, or all of the above.

For Pagans, this is inconceivable. Many of us are animists, who believe everything has a spirit, including trees and rocks. And if those can have spirits, surely all humans do, too -- no matter the color of their skin. All beings have innate dignity. All deserve to live without harm.

As for those who are participating in this ongoing atrocity -- from those who are incarerating children to those who are defending the government's actions, as well as those who could stop it but aren't, for the sake of political expediency? If they won't listen to their own religious teachings, they might consider heeding the Rede and the Threefold Law. Because people are being harmed by their actions, and the energy they're sending out is clearly negative. And karma's a bitch.

***
These moments of karmic blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.