“Against Giving Up”

“Against Giving Up”   June 30, 2019   Dr. Roger Ray                     

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Paraphrase of Talmudic teaching of Rabbi Tarfon, late 1^stcentury

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.

Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now.

You are not obligated to complete the work,

But neither are you free to abandon it.

In this Orwellian time in history, it seems that the remarkable events of our lives have taken over the pulpit and my only real task is to interpret these events in ways that continue to offer an orientation to reality and a bulwark against despair. Ron Paul thought he was quoting Orwell when he said that “Truth is treason in the empire of lies.” Which sounds like something Orwell might have said but, alas, he didn’t.

But we know what it means. Our current president tells lies so often that now, for example, when even our intelligence agencies try to tell the world that Iran set two tankers on fire in the Gulf of Oman, no one believes them. Japan and Norway replied that they would need more evidence and the tankers that were set on fire were from Japan and Norway! So, preaching, for me, has become an exercise of trying to tell the truth in what has become an empire of lies. 

But before I fall headlong into current events, I would like to invite you to remember with me a fictional novel from the 16^thcentury, Don Quixote. The actual novel, in two parts, is impossibly long and complicated but the central themes were pulled out about 50 years ago and turned into a musical. 

In both the play and the movie, the character of Don Quixote is a middle-aged man who becomes inspired by old novels about the days of knights who chivalrously fought the villains of the world to bring honor and justice to their victims. He is indisputably mad, in a schizophrenic sort of way, imagining a windmill to be a four-armed giant against whom he sets out to do battle. The character is simultaneously sad and comedic. After the attack on the windmill goes badly, he retreats to a local tavern that he imagines to be a castle. 

There is a barmaid there, Aldonza, which, for 16^thcentury Spain, means that she was both a servant girl and, to put it bluntly, a village prostitute. Men abuse her, make sport of her, and treat her horribly. In the play, men even sing songs to taunt her and make her miserable. But Quixote walks in and sees Aldonza and imagines her to be a princess, Dulcinea. When he tries to treat her as a noble object of his loyal adoration, she is enraged. Abused people often assume that even kindness is somehow mocking. 

But his persistent respect begins to inspire her to think differently of herself. In the end, the men of the tavern attack her brutally because the world, once it has a victim, is loath to see that person, or those people, as anything but victims. The play does not have a happy ending so far as most people in the audience would see it, but Aldonza forcers her way into Quixote’s home as he laid dying because his adoration for her had made it impossible for her to think of herself as anything but Dulcinea. In fact, in the closing scene, Sancho calls her Aldonza and she corrects him, “My name is Dulcinea.” And she announces, though Quixote is dead, his spirit lives on.

The five-hundred-year-old novel leaves its footprints in our language. We will describe a foolish objective or quest to be Quixotic. We will say that someone who strives to fight for justice in meaningless ways is “tilting at windmills.” Quixote is the quintessential madman, but in the end, recognizing that it is fiction, was the women he adored Aldonza or Dulcinea?

The men in the tavern looked on her as a thing to be used. Quixote, in his madness, saw her as a woman to be adored. 

Surely you must know where I am going with this. The men of the tavern may have been technically correct… she was a servant girl, a maid, a slave of sorts, more or less, a sex slave. That may have been factually true, but the madman saw her as something of inestimable value and simply by being seen that way, her reality was changed. 

I do not mean to be cruel or manipulative. I would bring this up in a more gentle way if I knew how. But when you look at these children who have walked or been carried through a thousand miles of poverty, danger, civil war, sometimes sexual assault, to show up on our border asking for refuge. When you look at these little brown children, sleeping on a concrete floor, covered by an aluminum blanket, left undernourished, dirty, and often sick and infected with lice. 

When you look at them, what do you see? Illegal immigrants? Children who do not deserve decent treatment because they should not have been brought here in the first place? Do you see Aldonza? 

Trump said that the whole family separation policy was started under Obama and that he was trying to reunite families. When confronted by the squalid conditions in which children are being housed in concentration camps on the border, Trump blamed the Democrats who would not give them enough funds to be able to provide blankets, soap, and toothbrushes. 

Caliburn International Corpis one of many military for-profit corporations operating the concentration camps where asylum seeking families and children are being detained. There are more than 15,000 children in US detention centers. Caliburn International and their ilk are charging tax payers $750 per day, per child. Trump administration spokespersons told the media that they cannot afford to give proper bedding, clean clothes, soap, and toothbrushes to these children because Democrats in congress will not provide sufficient funding. 

Hilton Garden Inn, when I put Bishop Spong up when he and Christine are in town, costs $110 a night, or $55 per person for the two of them. But we are not talking about 3-star hotels, are we? Do you know what a foster parent in Missouri is paid to care for a child? Caliburn is billing $750 a day and is not obligated to provide a bed, clean clothes, decent food, or even soap and a toothbrush. $11 a day for a small child. $12.40 for a teenager. 

Can you imagine getting $750 a day for taking care of a kid? That trust fund baby would want for nothing . . . if you saw them as a kid, and not just an opportunity to get rich. Mind you, all of this is going on while conservatives are trying to scare tax-paying citizens about the socialism of universal healthcare and tuition-free higher education. What I wish that I could say to every unemployed or underpaid American is this: Immigrants are not the reason why you are poor. Corporate Socialism is what is making you poor. It is the Corporate Socialism that lets Amazon make $12 billion in profits last year and yet paid no taxes. 

It is the Corporate Socialism that allows military industrial corporations to bill tax payers $750 a day for caging children rather than providing healthcare, education, and a living wage to citizens. And, come on, 15,000 children? What is going on with that?

President Obama was often criticized for his aggressive deportation policy. He was called by many Latinos, “The Deporter in Chief.” Obama’s administration deported over 400,000 people. The problem here is not so much the deportations under Trump. The problem for me, right now, is these 15,000 kids he is holding onto. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to deport millions of illegal immigrants . . . some of whom are currently changing the bedding and mopping the floors at Mar-a-Lago. It hasn’t happened. He is not engaging in mass deportation but is, instead, turning these children into semi-permanent prisoners he can use as profit centers for his political cronies. For him, all of these children are Aldonza. I am just asking if anyone else can see Dulcinea among them?

When my daughter was little, she went through some tough attachment issues. She would sometimes scream inconsolably when I had to leave for work. This went on for some time but eventually she came to accept that I would always come back. It was traumatic for her because I was her primary care giver and, for a very young toddler, survival depends on that attachment.

Imagine being a toddler who traveled hundreds of miles, facing exhaustion, dehydration, starvation, and then, finally surviving to cross the border and then to be taken from the father or mother who had held your hand, walked with you, carried you, protected you. You are taken away, put in a dog kennel, separated from anyone you have ever known. And the mom or the dad just doesn’t come back at the end of the day, or at night, and not next week, or next month. Can you imagine the trauma? The screams . . . the tears . . . and what may be worse, when the screams and tears are replaced with a blank stare, a void, empty, hopelss little heart.

There was a large study done on several thousand people called the “Adverse Childhood Experiences Study” (ACE) What the Kaiser Permanente institute discovered was that if you had a childhood trauma you were predictably more likely to have a major episode of depression as an adult. The more trauma you experience, the more likely you were to have a problem with depression. If a child had six traumatic experiences, they were five times more likely to have depression as an adult. But here, when I think about these kids in cages, daily subjected to the trauma of separation, of cold, of hunger, illness, filthy, isolation . . . the study showed that if a child had seven categories of traumatic events they were more than 300 times more likely to commit suicide as an adult. 

At noon on Tuesday, protestors are gathering outside the local offices of members of congress to protest this state sponsored child abuse that every day is traumatizing 15,000 innocent children. I will be outside the office of Billy Long at noon on Tuesday. I hope that our listeners will find the congressional office near you. Congress will be on its 4^thof July recess so if Billy Long is not playing poker in Las Vegas, he may actually be here in his office. 

As bad as the trauma is, some people don’t even survive the process. Our news moves so quickly that we hear of one case at a time, but, in the past two years, 24 people have died in ICE custody. Some from such basic causes as thirst, and many from very treatable illnesses. 

When this gruesome image of a father and infant daughter who drowned while, in desperation, tried to swim across the Rio Grande because the bridge has been closed by the Trump administration hit the media, it revived media interest in the whole border crisis. But as horrifying as this image is, this is not an isolated incident. About 300 immigrants are believed to die along the Mexican/US border every year as they try to enter America. Some drown, some die of thirst in the desert. 

The skeletal remains of immigrants are often found in the Arizona desert. There is no way to accurately count the death toll. Some local residents have formed a group called “No More Deaths.” They strategically place water and food in the common trails the immigrants use. 

Scott Warren, an Arizona teacher, was recently arrested for the crime of giving water to a dying immigrant. He was put on trial with the treat of being imprisoned for 20 years. 

His trial ended a couple of weeks ago with a hung jury. At least some of the jurors simply could not send this guy to prison for the crime of treating people like they were people. But, evidently, there were ICE agents, prosecutors, and a judicial system that was more than willing to arrest him, charge him, try him, and attempt to send him to prison . . . they just didn’t get away with it, this time. 

I don’t mean to make this such a hard sermon. I accept that preaching is a matter of speaking truth to power, and now it is a matter of treason . . . speaking truth in an empire of lies. But you are not all called to be preachers, or prophets, or journalists, or even protestors. But you are called to give a cup of cold water to someone in dire thirst. You can choose to see the refuse of society, the ones no one wants, the ones Trump wants to build a wall against or at least to lock into a $750 a day cage, and you can choose to see them as the princes and princesses of Central America. There is no Aldonza among them. They are all Dulcinea.

I will end where we began this morning with this paraphrased first century bit of the Jewish Talmud: Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.

Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now.

You are not obligated to complete the work,

But neither are you free to abandon it.

Join me, please, in being so crazy, that we see illegal immigrants as people.