Do It For Love
People rallied across the country to fiercely denounce the horrific immigration policies of Donald Trump and his administration. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Detroit saw large rallies. Smaller towns gathered as well. Here in Maine, Portland saw so many people come to the steps of the City Hall that streets had to be closed down to traffic. I went with friends to the tourist town of Bar Harbor where about 250 gathered on the Village Green.
Organized by MDI Indivisible most of the signs were homemade. They carried simple messages. “This is just wrong.” “Call it what it is, ethnic cleansing.” “You can’t have family values if you don’t value families.” “Stop caging children.” “Families belong together.”
The bandstand was surrounded by stick figure cut-out chains, connecting people. Bo Greene who opened the event encouraged people to think together, to reflect, and to commit to actions. She acknowledged that we are at the beginning of a very long struggle.
As I imagine happened in most of the more than 750 gatherings, a series of speakers followed, each offering a different perspective on why we needed to act in this moment. A priest-geneticist talked of faith and DNA, emphasizing the long scope of our human need for connection. A social worker followed. She asked us all to remember a time when we as children had feared the loss of our parents and to use that memory to imagine what so many young people are experiencing at the hands of our government. She reminded us that the trauma of separation echoes through generations, as we have learned from the experiences shared by Indigenous people, from people whose families were separated in slavery, from people separated from loved ones in the name of making us safe. Real safety, she said, comes as we find ways to connect, to love, and protect one another. A young woman followed, talking of her work in migrant communities. The core of this policy, she emphasized, is racism, disguised by a claim to security. All children deserve places to play, to laugh, to delight in a world of safety and protection. She was followed by a new African American citizen, a lawyer, mother, and minister’s wife who talked of how complicated it is to have chosen to love a country that is violating the most fundamental human rights, the deepest dictates of faith.
The speeches concluded with Bo Greene asking us to find ways to recognize that we come to this moment from different perspectives. Some of us are people of faith, some are activists, some are supporting candidates, and some are concerned parents. She encouraged us to find ways to honor the truth that each of us brings and to find ways to move forward together.
All of us know that rallies will not stop Trump and his forces. But these demonstrations are essential steps in finding ways to move toward a just future as we learn together to take responsibility for making a different kind of country. In the course of these efforts, we are opening ourselves and each other to the possibilities of creating essential connections.
In a recent article, Rebecca Solnit observed:
In the short term we are working to protect the rights of immigrants and to prevent families from being torn apart at the border—and to address the relationship between our greenhouse gas emissions and the global climate, between our economic systems and poverty, between what we do and what happens beyond us, because the ideology of isolation is in part a denial of cause and effect relations and a demand to be unburdened even from scientific fact and the historical and linguistic structures governing truth. In the long term, our work must be to connect and to bring a vision of connection as better than disconnection, for oneself and for the world, to those whose ideology is “I really don’t care”—whether or not it’s emblazoned on their jackets. Somewhere in there is the reality that what we do we do for love, if it’s worth doing.