My new normal revolves around the bus schedule. I feel the urgency around 4-5pm to start my commute before it gets dark. I feel the fear of walking home down the dark street alone in a not so safe neighborhood. My new normal is eating tortillas y frijoles cada dia. My new normal is living without running water or heat. My new Saturday night is staying in a house across the border with dirt floors and no door. It is waking up at 6am everyday, and depending on which side of the border I am, hearing roosters. My new normal does not include days off. My new weekends are spent attending memorials or doing desert aid training. It is sharing a meal with Jeremias Algar Garcia who spent the last 24 days traveling from his home in Guatemala riding on top of a train. (and the last 15 of those days without a bed). Jeremias will be crossing al otro lado in the next three days. Sometime in the next three days the man who I sat next to, shared tortillas and stories with, will be walking through the desert under the scorching sun. Did you know that if you are doing moderate exercise in the sun that you need 4 pints of water an hour? There is no way that someone can carry enough water to last the 3 to 4 days walk. And those 3 days is just the minimum, you can get lost or get blisters that are so bad that half of your foot comes off when you take off your shoes. Or you can suffer from heat exhaustion or hypothermia.
And then there’s la migra. I have read over forty cases of border patrol abuse. (These are just the cases that I entered into the data collector. No More Deaths has collected over 1,000 since they published their report Crossing the Line just two years ago) Stories that make you sick to your stomach, that make you want to cry and rage at the same time. I don’t want to demonize the border patrol, I know that the agents are humans for better or for worse and that they are just individuals within a greater system. But it is not just a case of “a few bad apples” it is far more pervasive than that. It is systematic violence and abuse. This is happening right now, those cases were from earlier this year. So for the next three days, for the next 15 weeks, and perhaps for the rest of my life I will be praying that God will watch over Jeremias and all the Jeremias. Jeremias is not an illegal alien. He is a human who is in search of a better life for himself and his family, like 98% of the people who are crossing the border.
We met with the two agents of the Border Patrol and took a tour of the station. When asked why they think people cross the border, they both said that most people are looking for jobs or to reunite with their families. They then went on to say that there are criminals and terrorists too, which is why the border needs to be secured. Daniela, a student with the program, asked them how many terrorists they apprehend in a year. They didn’t know. She asked them how do they know if they’ve apprehended a terrorist. “Well if they’re involved in terrorist activity” they answered. She asked them, “What is terrorist activity?” They thought for a minute and stumbled “well if they’re smuggling a bomb across and that sometimes Chinese terrorists try to cross the border”. Their story was that Chinese communist terrorists go to Mexico, learn the language and stay there for a few months before crossing the border into the United States. I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit. That doesn’t make any sense. If the whole point of having the border secured is to prevent terrorism how come they don’t even know how many terrorists they’ve caught? Or how to define terrorist activity? And why would Chinese terrorists go through mexico when they could enter through the Canadian/U.S. border which is far easier to cross?
My new normal is feeling so many emotions at once that I don’t even know what I’m feeling anymore. My new normal is loneliness. It is desperately longing and needing to talk to a familiar loved one but when I get on the phone you’re speechless. I can’t relate my experiences, there’s just this disconnect because we no longer live in the same world. Well in actuality, the scariest thing is, is that we both still live in the same world I’m just looking at it from a different angle. Its like those illusions in which you can see two pictures in the same drawing, and although we’re looking at the same picture we are seeing two different things.
My new normal is finding out that the privileged developed world I’ve lived in for the past twenty years is a lie. That it would not exist without the world I’m living in now. Development and Underdevelopment are both a product of Capitalism. There can not be one without the other because Development is not based off of natural resources or “Guns, Germs, and Steel”. Developed countries are developed because they effectively exploited underdeveloped countries and people. My new normal is realizing the government, the state, is not benign. That laws aren’t written to protect the people but to protect the interests of the dominant group in society.
My new normal is not even knowing what normal is anymore. My life, two, almost three weeks ago, feels as distant as a dream. I don’t know how or if I can return to that world knowing what I know now. I feel like Neo. I took the red pill and now I’m seeing how far the rabbit hole goes. I am waking up to reality and the illusions of this world have been shattered. And how do I communicate that to someone who has not seen what I have seen or been where I have been? I don’t know. Everyday I feel the gap between my old life and my new life widen and I don’t know how to bridge that gap. I know if I read this blog, or heard myself talking that I would think I was crazy. But I’m not, it’s the rest of the world that is crazy. It is the people in power who define what is crazy or not, and they want to protect themselves. So if you’re reading this, please listen, and don’t be so quick to dismiss what I’m telling you.
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