** This is a copy of a speech I gave at a forum about the Syrian refugee crisis yesterday. It is a hybrid of a slam poem I wrote and a speech I gave at a rally a few months ago and put on this blog already, but I'm reposting it here again anyhow.
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This year, as far away
people reap what our foreign policy has sown, Islamophobia is breaching
the walls of my town’s rich-white-liberal snowglobe. I start to hear things in
the hallways. A girl I know says we have to keep the refugees out because
they're probably terrorists. She says it's in their religion.
But if there’s a religion
whose doctrines mandate war and terror, it is less Islam than US foreign
policy. But for now we here—in my town, in Massachusetts, in the US—are still at
enough of a remove that we don’t yet have to reckon with the “refugee crisis.”
We can think of it in terms of numbers, but in terms of people? Lives? I’m not
sure. People live there. People live there, but do we realize that? We take the
people fleeing the violence we visited on them, and brand them the potential
enemy. We look at our Muslim neighbors and brand them dangerous. We look at the
politicians forcing their perpetual doctrine down the throats of countries
whose names we can't pronounce while spoon-feeding us national insecurity.
Shouldn’t it be those politicians who warrant the branding of enemy or
dangerous?
Haven’t you heard those
phrases, “People who forget history are condemned to repeat it?” How about
“doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the
definition of insanity?” There’s some truth in those. Wars that never worked
are not going to start now. Spreading terror and calling it democracy
does not make it democracy, but does undermine what democracy we might have
here in the US. Bombing terror will only seed more because you can't
bomb terror, you can only bomb people, and we have.
In Massachusetts, in cities like mine, we like to style ourselves progressive. But there’s actively progressive and then there’s passively progressive--doing something or just kind of thinking
something. We have the luxury to choose to keep sitting back, hoping the
military solution will work this time (remember, definition of insanity),
hoping that we never have to face up to the role of both our aggression and our
indifference. Never mind that the refugees are fleeing the same people we’re
thirsting for war with; that they are not the aggressors. Never mind that we’re
grudgingly admitting what, a couple thousand people? into the US, despite our
disproportionate responsibility. Even Europe is facing the tip of an iceberg
compared to the numbers that countries like Lebanon and Jordan are shouldering.
Never mind that it was our military misadventures that caused the crucible of
instability and brutality and devastation that spawned this crisis in the first
place.
But no, never mind all
that. (Or actually, please do mind.) Because the official line is the same as it
always is: be afraid, be very afraid. Even in places like here, we’re hardly
immune to fearmongering.
Fear is useful to the
architects of war. The fear that makes us malleable is a tool that will be used
against us, to drum up support for policies that don’t make anyone safer. This
is the fear that makes us accede to legislation that strips away our rights and
laws, and wars that drain money and human lives. This is the fear that spirals
into apathy when our reaction is to batten down the hatches and seal ourselves
off from what we may call terrorism.
One of the best antidotes
to mindless, racist fear is knowledge. Awareness of the facts on the ground and
the possible courses of action. The knowledge that this atmosphere of fear and
instability and warmongering is a strategy, advancing the interests of the
corporate and military elite. It has been done before and it will be done
again. But it’s not a foregone conclusion. The outcomes still depend on how
people choose to think, and how we choose to act. So let’s call the refugees
our future neighbors, colleagues, teachers, doctors, friends. And redefine
enemy—as war, Islamophobia, empire, racism, hatred, fear.
Here’s one last appeal to
the youth here: we have a certain power to remake the world. We have an
especial vulnerability to feeling that there’s nothing we can do, but I see
hopeful things alongside the flashes of bigotry. I was at a slam poetry
competition recently and several of the poems people performed focused on
Islamophobia and rejecting fear and hatred. There is a broader, more humane
consciousness growing here, I want to believe. That’s what peace organizations and political clubs like mine are trying to tap into. We know how to think. We
can stand up to the narratives we’re taught. We can make the difference.
