The Border Patrol officer asked:

“Are you both American citizens?” sticking his own Latino face into the car to get a look at mine.“Yes,” I said emphatically. We were not crossing any borders. We were on a good old American road trip. Hardly anyone else was on that winding mountain road hugging the Rio Grande River. My heart was not in my throat when I clearly spoke up, “Yes, I am an American.” What exactly does that mean these days? On that, I am not so clear.

The sheer beauty and magnitude of these vast valley plateaus, buttes and mesas shone crimson at sunrise and golden at sundown. No other than the hand of the Creator could have carved such magnificence. The opposite side of the Rio Grande looked identical. Yes, I am an American citizen who lays claim to this side of God’s creation. A river separates “us” from “them.” Yes, I am an American citizen, but for the grace of God, I would be over on the other border road. If asked that same question there, my answer would have entirely different implications. Who of us asks to be the citizen of the country of our birth? We simply become citizens immediately. Then at some time, someone asks, “Are you a citizen?”

There is only one answer.

Later that day, standing before a large flat boulder completely covered with handmade trinkets, I stared across the Rio Grande River. Within a stone’s throw, on the opposite bank, in the border town of Boquillas, there were Mexicans with voices loud enough to be heard. Both a rowboat and a burro were tied up at the water’s edge. When we look across at the Mexicans, I want to wave a “Hello.” Words on the white plastic jug read, “Boquillas no wall. 10 dollars. Good bless you.” I bend over to pick up one of the wiry figurines of that silly roadrunner bird. “It is illegal for us to buy these,” says a woman holding a chihuahua like a baby in her arms. “It’s illegal for them to sell things to us. As soon as you put money in that jar, they’ll jump in that boat and come to get it. They’ve set up camp over there and are watching us.” She and her husband, she says, are volunteers, training for work with the Border Patrol. “They’d risk getting arrested for ten bucks?” I ask, looking across the river, where the laughter is getting louder. “Yes, sometimes they row over. If the river is low, they walk across. Border Patrol warned us against interacting in any way with them. They come with others to get the money, but you never know how many of them will come.

Listening to her speaking of “them,” who appear to be a couple of young men wearing white cowboy hats, I decide I am not willing to take the risk for me or them. Just then, a Border Patrol truck appears and slowly comes toward us. As I walk away, the truck makes a U-turn. I wonder: “Who is the alien? ‘Me’ on my borderland, or ‘them’ on their borderland with the Border Patrol in between?” A river running through the two is a natural border if not a deterrent.

On the U.S. side, the Governor of the state with the most borderland is polluting the river with razor-sharp barbed wire as a means of torturing anyone who is trying to come across. He fails to understand that those who dare already know about torture from their homeland making it merely a calculated risk to remain or leave. Torture is torture no matter which side of the river you find yourself.

Some years ago, a U.S.Human Rights Commission in Guatemala worked to bring to light the disproportionately growing number of womens' bodies (often decapitated) left in the road for dogs to find, unless children found their mother's bodies first. At that time the number of murdered women had risen to 3,000 in a short few years* Nobody was named in these murders, no punishment was meted out because law enforecemt, of which there is plenty including young boys with machine guns strapped over their shoulders, turned away from these heinous crimes committed with total impunity.

In 2005, I traveled to Guatemala to join up with the group who worked to try to bring the pandemic of femicide** to the international news headlines. Within 24-hours of my arrival, the group had packed up and moved to an undisclosed location because their apartment and office had been ransacked. It was a warning to cease and desist. I never got to join them, all things considered, perhaps that was just as well. However, the question that burned in my mind remained: Why were so many women brutally murdered and by whom? I figured I would never find that answer as a white woman from America. Then, one day in a private conversation with a woman from the Habitat for Humanity office, she said in a whisper what could never be said out loud: "We do not talk about our husbands that way." Domestic violence! That I was taken by surprise says something about me, but it is not surprising to any woman living in a macho culture. These women breaking their backs daily over looms, or cooking over hotplates in the piazza before returning home to violence, have stayed with me the past twenty years. I am reminded of them whenever I see the latest nameless, almost faceless, migrants at the edge of the Rio Grande. These women with their small children trying to cross the Mexican-U.S. border have every reason and right to try.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_1POKKgxqU

*Guatemalan Humans Rights Commission/USA Annual Report, 2007.

**unwomen.org

Marshall-ing the Truth

Some people are like lightning rods. Electricity filled the lecture hall that day when I went “shopping” for an interesting course beyond my own campus quad. The course description “called” to me because that very word, call, was strategically chosen to attract people just like me from beyond the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (KSG). It was standing room only. I expected to be wait-listed as I registered for “Organizing: People, Power, and Change” taught for decades by Professor Marshall Ganz. I got into the course by virtue of the fact that I was a graduate student at Episcopal Divinity School (where two years later an honorary Doctorate would be conferred upon Marshall Ganz). I had heard that intentional call from across town.

That entire semester was loaded with way too much reading (which upon hearing our complaints, Professor Ganz agreed to a few less books); loads of lively in-person discussion (led by a consummate facilitator); loads of storytelling about years in the field, literally, (Ganz worked sixteen years with Cesar Chavez to unionize California farm migrants without a voice of their own); loads of encouragement and support for real time organizing projects of our choosing. My project took me to Washington, D.C. at the midterm break to advocate for organizing Habitat for Humanity Global Village builds. I had recently led a Habitat team to post-tsunami Thailand. I felt empowered! I felt energized when I returned to the lecture hall. With his team of teaching assistants, Professor Ganz listened to our stories using a tried and true teaching methodology that guided each project to some conclusion by the end of one semester. No easy feat. Yet, it all felt seamless.

One day, when I was asked by one “T.A.” “Why do you do this work?”, without hesitating, I said: “God”. She smiled and suggested I say that in class. I suggested that would not be well received outside of Div. School. When the question was posed in the room, I waited. Other students said: “To help people who can’t help themselves”; “To do something meaningful”; “To make a difference”; Then, I said the “G” word, out loud. You could hear the silence. Then, one younger student (I was the age of the Professor), awkwardly said: “Me, too. I want to put my faith into action in the world.” Another student, admitted she, too, wanted to talk about how faith mattered to the work . . . her work. So, we did just that, right there, openly, directly, gently, and honestly with Professor Marshall Ganz giving each person a voice. The class ran over. Nobody left the room. Afterward, Ganz said to his T.A., “Who would have thought we would ever hear the word God at the Kennedy School?” I looked up, and with a big grin, he pointed across that vast room to me: “You did that!”

Some days later, we ran into one another on the street. He was toting his well-worn Old Testament under his arm. I asked where he was going with that Bible. He told me each week he and some others got together to read the stories. Like me, like others, faith was integral to his work. He wore it openly on his sleeve, or under his arm. He wasn’t trying to impress anyone, certainly not at KSG! That’s why I was completely taken aback this past week when an email came with an attached story written by Professor Ganz in response to charges brought against him for bringing into the classroom his "antisemitism”. He writes eloquently about his feelings, his understanding of current events in Israel and Gaza, and what had happened to bring such condemning charges against him in his very own lecture hall where he had mentored so many students. (see link at end)*

https://scholar.harvard.edu/marshallganz/home

What I, and so many others, had encountered in that very room, week after week, was a consistent message delivered by a truth teller that emphasized how everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, age, sex, and most importantly, one's own faith, is equally worthy. We are all people in search of a voice that can be aided at times by organizing and empowering people to create change for the better.

Dr. Marshall Ganz, having devoted his entire adult life to others’ causes, deserves nothing less for himself.

*https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-palestine-antisemitic/

Who??

“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare penned that query for “Romeo and Juliet” and it stuck! Names are sticky whether we like the name given to us or not. My “nom de plum” is my maternal grandmother’s name and my middle name. I loved her and her name. We want to know someone by name, to feel familiar in that familial way of belonging with and to one another. I suspect that’s why we also name our pets to make them one of us /ours. We also give names to those other creatures that in no way ever could belong to us. I’m talking about the most mysterious beings among us: creatures of the wild. How we come to connect with them, in part, is by conferring names of our choosing upon them. For example, once a baby alligator  whose given name was Alfonso, began life within the confines of this Florida condo development. Of course, Alfonso had no idea she/he had a name and those who named her/him seemed to have no idea that one day she/he would become a full grown carnivore! That didn’t stop anyone from taking Alfonso into the communal family until one day, when it was almost too late, trappers came to move Alfonso to a more conducive (civilized) place to live. What were they thinking? Why do we name a wild creature? I have been wondering this since I read about"Flaco the Owl” in the Sunday New York Times (Feb. 4).

For thirteen years, Flaco, so-called, lived in captivity at the Central Park Zoo. Of Eurasian descent, he is the only one of his species living in NYC. The story says Flaco “escaped,” but not without the help of a human who a year ago cut the mesh overhead that had confined this wild bird. Flaco took flight one night, as owls are want to do, and has been flying freely around Manhattan skyscrapers and towers and tall trees in the park, not far from where he used to live.

Birdwatchers, of which I am a card-carrying member, have scoped him out and offer a “hoot route” map for anyone who wants to keep track of Flaco’s whereabouts. His eyes are his most distinguishing feature, setting him apart from all the other nameless owls out and about at night in the city. His eyes are not yellow but orange. Flaco has been peering, or shall we say staring, into apartments all over Fifth Avenue. Early attempts to capture and return Flaco to the zoo were unsuccessful, and so it was determined he should remain at large. Humans it seems had to come to terms with the nature of this mysterious being who can fly up to 10,000 feet with its wing span of over six feet. My heart goes out to Flaco, the way it once did to Spooky the Owl when I was six years old.

Spooky lived at the Boston Museum of Science from the age of three. I knew him well because every Friday night when admission to the museum was free, my father took me and my sisters on the train into the city to see Spooky. There we sat crossed-legged and wide-eyed as the handler, wearing massive gloves up to his elbow, held Spooky before us while he told and showed us how his head could turn 180 degrees; how his vision was superior to ours in the dark; how his wings were silent in flight. Then he would release the tethered bundle of feathers in one fell swoop over our heads. WOW! Every kid on the floor said on cue. Even though I knew what was coming, I couldn’t help myself. I was awed each and every time by Spooky. In my heart of hearts I wanted Spooky to escape the man with the gloves, the museum’s fluorescent lights, and the big city lights that enthralled my six-year- old senses. I wanted to hear him hoot!

These nights in NYC, Flaco has been hooting for hours at a time with the lighted skyline as backdrop. He has no need to claim his territory, he rules the roost, as it were. Flaco is calling for a mate! A few birders know there is a Grand Dame of Owls named Gertrude(!) living in the park. They are hoping for a “Romeo and Juliet” scene. I am not.

I am secretly hoping that Flaco discovers for himself, before it’s too late, that he can soar 10,000 feet above it all. He may not know where to go, but that’s okay, most of us don’t. We like to think we do, and so we live our lives accordingly, until one day the mesh above our heads is torn asunder. That is the moment of truth when we must come to terms with who we are meant to be before it’s too late.

One day, when my son was six, I took him to the Boston Museum. I wondered about Spooky’s fate after so many years. He had died in captivity at the age of 38, outliving any other Great Horned Owl by nearly 30 years! Museum people still refer to him by his given name, Spooky. He wasn’t at all spooky to me or anyone who recalls that mystery with wings. One of my all time favorite poems which I drove miles to hear the author read aloud is “The Owl and the Lightning”:

. . . .”This was the law on the night the owl was arrested. He landed on the top floor; through the open window of apartment 14-E across the hall, a solemn white bird bending the curtain rod. In the cackling glow of the television, his head swiveled, his eyes black. The cops were called and threw a horse blanket over the owl, a bundle kicking. Soon after, lightning jabbed the building, hit apartment 14-E, scattering bricks from the roof like beads from a broken necklace.

The sky

blasted white, detonation of thunder.

Ten years old at the window, I knew then that God was not the man in my mother’s holy magazines, touching fingertips to dying foreheads with the half-smile of an athlete signing autographs. God must be an owl, electricity coursing through the hollow bones, a white wing brushing the building.” Martin Espada From “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (New York Times Poem of the New Year in 1996).