I joined ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) in late fall of the year 2001. Having a fierce love for America since I could remember, and the desire to achieve a personal goal of mine, 9/11 was the push that I needed to make a long-term commitment to the service and defense of my country. It was the event that kicked me into action. It gave me an opportunity to put my money where my mouth was and protect and defend what I loved - America’s reputation throughout the world as a beacon of hope and light and freedom. And on 9/11, someone attacked and threatened that. They threaten our way of life.
A decade and a half later, in November of 2018, I had a beautiful Thanksgiving meal with my family and with our close friends and next-door neighbors, a family of immigrants from China. We enjoy cooking together and trying different foods from the other’s and culture (they own a Chinese Restaurant). We speak zero Mandarin and they speak a minuscule amount of English. Somehow, we have got to know them very well, thanks to Google Translate and some creative methods.
Around that same time, I saw an image circulating on social media. It was striking and it evoked an immediate physical reaction. My heartbeat sped up, I winced, and enlarged it. I had to find out more about it, so I began to research. The image was of a mother, grabbing, no, yanking her two children by their small arms, as they ran away from a fired canister of tear gas. In the military, I have experienced tear gas several times. Each time, I dreaded that day of training. I knew how my lungs would burn and my eyes and nose would would be running faucets until my body recovered. No matter how hard or how much I coughed, it felt impossible to clear my airway. Today I am a mother of 2 young children, and without even realizing it, my mind was suddenly filled with images of MY children, coughing, wheezing, crying, waiting for their mother to make this better. To save them from this chaotic, confusing, traumatizing experience. “Mommy, make it stop!”
This was a mother traveling with her 3 children from Honduras, fleeing the danger in her home country and hoping to reunite with her husband who was already living in the U.S. They made it to Tijuana with the thousands of others who are camped outside the southern border, waiting for the chance to seek asylum. The children in the photo are 5-year old twin girls. Neither of them are wearing pants. One has no shoes on. One, maybe both, are wearing a diaper. In the background, there is a large mound of dirt on which sits a fence of stone, metal, and barbed wire, and towers high above the other people in the photo. In a later interview, the woman explained she saw the crowd making movements towards the border and went to see what was happening. What she couldn’t see, was that some people had begun digging under the border wall, which was met with force by Border Control Agents and sent a large crowd running from tear gas. Later, the mother, named Maria Meza, stated, “If they close the border, I ask God that here in Tijuana, or in another country, they open doors to us, to allow me to survive with my children.”
Had I seen this image before 2001, I might have thought something like this, “Woman! Come HERE! Come to America! We can help you!” But now, I only felt sick and sad. She was coming to America. I had just celebrated a holiday that marks when Pilgrims traveled in deplorable conditions, across an ocean in order to seek a better life and future for their families. A holiday that marked a historical occasion of finding common ground in spite of differences. That must have seemed like a hopeful day. And I felt like I might have experienced just a sliver of that when my husband made a traditional Chinese pastry for our dessert, and we all ate sausage balls - something that Eddie’s late father always cooked. I help them register their kids in the public school system. They watch my boys when I find myself in a jam without a babysitter. I'm certain that no matter what, we will be life-long friends. And maybe that is the hope that Native Americans felt when their new friends showed them tools and planting methods. Of course, we all know what happened. Native Americans were eventually decimated by the new visitors.
The early settlers destroyed the Natives way of life. And somehow, through curious irony, we built a country that developed into a safe haven for others around the world. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” says the most well-known symbol of America and Patriotism, the Statue of Liberty. What a cruel coincidence of wording - “breath free.” The Statue gave me chills when I saw it for the first time. I’ve been told that my very own Irish ancestors came through that Statue. Immigrants….not citizens of the U.S. They had to COME HERE FIRST. Their request to stay had to be processed through security, health, and other things, of course. But first they had to just make it to the country - just as the first step for asylum seekers is to go to the country where they are requesting.
That is MY America. The America that I fell in love with and volunteered to defend with my life. I believed that was the very ideal that made our country so special. This mother of three, Maria, didn’t drag her bare-foot, scarcely clothed children over hundreds of miles, unknown dangers, and extraordinary risk just to storm our border and threaten “our way of life” like the terrorists we have been at war with for years. I believe she, and many others, came here BECAUSE of “our way of life.” And hoping and praying for the chance to be a part of it!
Years ago, I had confidence in our country to “do the right thing.” I bought books about the “Greatest Generation” of WW2. I was proud to hear reports of the humanitarian aid our country offered. I may have been overly idealistic and naive, I admit. But with the current crisis at our border, where thousands of desperate people are literally fleeing for their lives, leaving everything behind, and coming to our doorstep in hopes of requesting asylum, this is the first time that I feel like our country, as a whole, is intentionally doing so, so horribly wrong.
And so, again, for the second time in my life, I feel the “kick” that I need to put me into action for the service and defense of our country’s “way of life.” Again, I feel the pull to “put my money where my mouth is.” On Jan 27, I will travel to Tijuana and join up with the organization, Sanctuary Caravan. This is not about a wall. Or one man. This is about much more…humanity and a country where I can feel proud and confident to raise my children. My boys will stay at home, safe with their father. I don’t know yet how I will help. Whether taking care of other children while their parents meet with volunteer immigration lawyers to process their asylum requests, or the difficult manual labor of improving living quarters and sanitation conditions for those who are stranded with no end in sight. I am ready to work. I am ready to help. I am ready and willing to accept whatever risk I may encounter. It is in the service of my country, my way way of life, and for the future of all.
Sanctuary Caravan
Photo of family running from tear gas at border, taken by Kim Kyung-Hoon
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