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“What thing is the body when someone strips it of a name, a history, a family name? . . . When there is no face or trail or traces or signs . . . What thing is the body when it’s lost?”
how you know you’ve met the right person when they don’t aim to change you but appreciate you for who you are.
Count them all. Name them so as to say: this body could be mine. The body of one of my own. So as not to forget that all the bodies without names are our lost bodies.
“Moral injury is a learned behavior, learning to accept the things you know are wrong.”
What I’m saying is that we learn violence by watching others, by seeing it enshrined in institutions. Then, even without choosing it, it becomes normal to us, it even becomes part of who we are.
the separation of families does not represent one isolated, horrifying event in our history; it is merely a chilling extension of the dehumanizing policies that came before it.
this highly contagious disease of exploitation has gradually become more subtle, but no less pervasive.
Violence does not grow organically in our deserts or at our borders. It has arrived there through policy.
the fact that the hundreds who continue to die there every year are losing their lives by design.
the true crisis at the border is not one of surging crossings or growing criminality, but of our own increasing disregard for human life.
“These brothers and sisters of ours were trying to escape difficult situations to find some serenity and peace; they were looking for a better place for themselves and their families, but instead they found death.”
The globalization of indifference makes us all ‘unnamed,’ responsible, yet nameless and faceless.”
“Compassion,” Susan Sontag famously declared, “is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”
in the end our feelings and our tears are useless unless they compel us to act in a way that might someday improve his situation.
