Contrasts

Where lies empathy?

I spent a recent Saturday morning protesting outside the regional immigrant detention center. It was my first time there, and I was surprised by its immensity – a former slaughterhouse/meat packing plant spread over multiple acres in an out-of-the way industrial center conveniently located next to a railroad track.

The place, I learned, warehouses many thousands of mostly black and brown humans. The majority of these people – documented, undocumented, citizens, green card holders – are guilty of the heinous crime of working their asses off to seek safety and a better life for their families, better than they left behind. Many have been arrested by government thugs as they went about their law-abiding lives in America, the land of the free.

While I was there with other like-minded associates I learned of the conditions inside the for-profit facility. For instance, there is no privacy. People sleep, eat, toilet and mostly sit around all day in large rooms filled to capacity with other detainees; they rarely get outdoors to move and breathe. I don’t know if they are segregated by gender. I learned the small meals they get are disgusting with nothing fresh and minimal nutritional value. The water they are given to drink is brown and dirty. There is little or no medical care; some have died for the lack.

In our formerly democratic nation, these humans are imprisoned without criminal charges and without a release date...unless you count deportation to a dangerous home country or a completely foreign land as “release.” I learned the numbers at this particular concentration camp are shrinking, not because people are regaining their freedom, but because the deportation process is accelerating. Most cannot afford the lawyers needed to plead their cases to a swollen and ineffective court system.

The activists I met there – far more persistent than I – have been demonstrating outside this detention center consistently for years, some at risk of arrest themselves. No one other than employees of the center is allowed to go beyond the reception area, including duly elected legislators. Some of those are suing for access to assess and ‘improve’ conditions inside. It seems the only real improvement would be to shut the place down and return it to its former meat-packing glory.

I left that place enraged with my heart broken open, especially after I was able to speak by phone with one of the detainees desperate to get out.

That was my morning.

As a toothpick of my small, rural and artsy community, my evening schedule included a “dress to the nines” cocktail party fundraiser for the local arts center.

Everyone who’s anyone in town was at this party, some to flash their prosperity, some to revel in the rare opportunity to dress up and some with the heartfelt intention to support art’s very important role in our lives today. Merriment was in abundance, and it was about abundance in support of the arts and local artists, most of whom couldn’t afford to attend. Some of the artists volunteered to serve drinks, provide auction bidding guidance, and a few performed. The party goers happily bid on art and experiences via a silent auction, the warm-up for the mondo auction and raise-the-paddle high dollar dinner event to follow.

At the close of the quite lovely cocktail party, two young talents stepped up to perform a medley of tunes, an act they had rehearsed for weeks. The emcee called on the crowd to quiet their chatter for the performance. When that failed he told all to turn to the person next to them and do a ‘shush.’ More responded. I sat next to two standing dudes who were just a couple feet from the eager performers where they continued their loud, intense discussion oblivious to any thing and any one around them, their voices loud enough to compete with the singers. I finally tapped one on the arm and asked him to stop talking in deference to the performers, so they lowered their intense, self-involved rhetoric to a loud whisper.

I point this out as an example of the attitude of privilege in this country where we worship net worth as achievement above any other value. And at that moment my mind slammed back to the detention center where our capitalist culture has criminalized poverty, even exploited it. Where my tax dollars are paying to brutalize anyone ‘stupid’ enough to work hard and obey the law.

The contrasts of that Saturday stick in my gut where I can still feel the terror, the pain and the sense of insurmountable vulnerability of those thousands of people who’ve fallen prey to the wolves of white supremacy. And it makes me wonder if there’s a point of ascendant privilege at which empathy is amputated form the human spirit.