"SI, SE PUENTES!"

“SI, SE PUENTE!”

            This phrase, adapted from Obama’s “Yes, we can!” was used over and over again at a recent rally that Caroline and I attended at Plaza Fiesta on Buford Highway in Chamblee.  It was part of the Lights for Liberty campaign to end the terrible detention camps for those trying to immigrate into the United States.  This rally was sponsored by the New Sanctuary Movement of Atlanta, whose chairperson is the Rev. Tom Haygood, pastor of Columbia Presbyterian Church.

             There were over 500 people there of many skin colors, many languages, and many religions.  There were lots of speakers, and they endured a hot summer evening, a thunderstorm, and jammed up space to help us share the cry for justice and mercy.  Those especially dynamic speakers would inspire us to break out into “Si, se puente,  Si, se puente!”  It was in stark contrast to the Trump crowd’s chant of “Send her back” in Greenville, North Carolina.  My co-author, Catherine Meeks, fired up the crowd with a strong voice and her urging us to do three things:  pray every day for the humanitarian crisis on the border (and make sure that our weekly worship services include such prayers), give money to the movement, especially to assist in travel expenses for those going to visit detained loved ones at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin County, and third, to contact our elected representatives to urge them to work to end the detention camps for all migrants.

            The most moving speaker to me was state representative Brenda Lopez Romero, the first Latinx person elected to the Georgia state legislature.  She was brought to this country as a young girl with her family from Mexico to seek asylum and a better life.  In a huge sign of the times in which we live, she praised Ronald Reagan because in his last speech as President, he urged a much more open approach to immigration.  She came to this country as a young girl, and she gave thanks that Reagan was president rather than Trump.  She noted, if she were a 5 year old Hispanic today, coming to this country as a migrant, she might have been one of those young children, stripped from her parents and herded into such inhumane detention camps.  As she envisioned that in her speech, several times she had to stop to collect herself.   During her pauses, we would shout “Si, se puente!”

            Though we were using a Spanish phrase adopted from President Obama’s campaign, several speakers noted that under President Obama, more people were deported than under any other president.   And that points us to the heart of the problem:  though we claim to be a welcoming people, we rarely ever have been until 1965, when President Johnson signed into law a much more open immigration policy.   We are now in a time of great challenge, of which Donald Trump is the symptom and not the cause.  Yes, we desperately need to defeat his bid for re-election, but we must also recognize that the issues are deeper and wider than we often want to admit. 

            The Trump rally in North Carolina last week was the first time that I have really felt that we were in grave danger during his presidency.  Part of that is my white, male privilege, but part of it also is an increasing sense among Trump followers that the only way out is to re-assert that white privilege for all to see and for all to accept.  People of color see it but do not accept it.  Those classified as “white” see it not as white privilege but as the natural order of things.  The white supremacists at the core of Trump’s base want us all to see white privilege and to accept it.  That is at the heart of the issue of how white people will seek to retain our power when the demographics change to make a non-majority society in the middle of this century.  

            This is nothing new in American culture.  In late August, we will remember the 400^th anniversary of the first Africans being brought to English colonies in Jamestown – they weren’t coming as a persecuted religious minority.  They were brought in chains to be sold as slaves.  These next 15 months will tell us whether we go back towards Jamestown, or whether we can live “Si, se puente.”  As Catherine Meeks put it so well at the Plaza Fiesta rally, the answer to that depends on us.  Let us find our voice for justice and equity, no matter in what language we speak or work.