My Choice, Not Yours

I made my choice while standing outside my (then) apartment building, smoking a cigarette and reading through the different kinds of procedures I could opt for. I forced myself to read through them so that I could make my own, informed choice, even though I had kind of already made it. A few hours beforehand I saw two lines on a stick, and my stomach clenched in fear, but I knew that I was ready to make many choices that would change my life as I knew it. That night, after work, I sat down with the person who was going to become my life partner, and before I even had a chance to say what I had decided he told me that it was my choice and he would be with me all the way, whatever I chose. After he said that I knew we were going to be OK.

The next day I went to Planned Parenthood to confirm the pregnancy, and was also presented with a choice. A box of tissues, and a choice. I could have made an appointment for an abortion there and then if I wanted to, but after blowing my nose I told the counsellor I wanted information on prenatal care, health insurance, and any other help they could provide. Planned Parenthood in NYC does not provide prenatal care, but they do provide counselling and information on prenatal care options in the city. Luckily they had some leaflets for a low cost women’s health clinic in Brooklyn, which I took with me. While I laid down in the soft, warm grass in Washington Square Park with a close friend by my side I called and made an appointment. I had stubbed my last cigarette out hours before and knew I was going to be OK. We were going to be OK.

I mention the word “choice” a lot in this story, and that is because every decision I made was based on my own personal choice. No one told me what I could or could not do, no one tried to push me in one direction or another, and legally I was able to either move forward with the pregnancy, or request an abortion without feeling any shame in doing so. Only three other people knew I was pregnant before I made the decision to keep my child, and if I had decided to go with an abortion, only those three people would have known.

When we, people who can become pregnant, say “my body, my choice” it is because we believe our bodies belong to us, that no one has the right to force us into something we don’t want, or to shame us for our choices. Nowadays there are many forms of contraception available, but they do not always work for everyone, for many reasons, and they are not always universally available to everyone either. I personally opted for an implant in my arm which lasts about 3 years and is supposed to be more than 99% effective, and luckily I have not had to deal with too many side effects. I know that I do not want any more children, but I also know that there is a tiny chance that I could be in the less than 1%. And if that happens, I will face another choice that will be personal. I am lucky to live in a state that still believes I am allowed to make my own choices about pregnancy, birth, and abortion. This implant that I have? One of the side effects is that I don’t really have periods with it. Which also means that if it fails, I won’t know immediately, maybe not for a few months.

When I went for my first ever prenatal appointment I knew I couldn’t be more than at the very most 8 weeks pregnant. My doctor took out a handheld Doppler and said she would try to find a heartbeat, but that it was most likely too early. Lo and behold there it was: a heartbeat. A week or so later I had an ultrasound to confirm my due date, and I was only 8 weeks along at that point, so my daughter’s heartbeat had actually already been detected when I was 6.5 weeks pregnant. I had only found out a week before that I was pregnant – and that was on the early side. I had a friend who was pregnant at the same time as me, and because she had irregular periods and no pregnancy side effects, didn’t find out she was pregnant until she was about 10 or 11 weeks along. If either of us were living in Alabama right now we wouldn’t have had a choice but to stay pregnant.

These heartbeat bills are just another way to control us. My personal situation is not the same as the woman standing in front of me at the store, and hers is not the same as the person standing in front of her. At that point in time I was happy to hear a heartbeat so early, but it could well have devastated me if I wasn’t ready or able to have a child. If you are so hell-bent on controlling our bodies are you also going to work on creating better opportunities, healthcare, education, etc. for all children? Yeah, I didn’t think so. These controlling laws have the aim of criminalizing abortion and are as prejudiced as many other restrictive laws in this country: they directly affect communities of color and those living below the poverty line. These laws have nothing to do with life, safety, or children, but have everything to do with control and the restriction of choice within a society.

“Pro-life” (aka pro-birth, anti-abortion) activists don’t believe in choice. They believe those of us who can get pregnant must remain pregnant no matter how the pregnancy was conceived, no matter the health of the mother or of the fetus, no matter the potential dangers to the mother or the fetus, and no matter whether the person is ready, able, or wants to be pregnant and have a child. Pro-choice activists believe it is the pregnant person’s choice, and that no one else has a say in the matter. Being responsible for the care and upbringing of a child is HARD and requires so much from a parent, for many years. Who are we to decide this for someone else? As I peruse Twitter I regularly read idiotic comments such as “well she should have kept her legs shut then!” (Why is it never “well he should have kept his dick in his pants”??), or “there are so many people waiting to adopt a child!”, or “stop using abortion as contraception!” Abstinence-only education has never been a viable option against unwanted pregnancy. And abortion is rarely used as a form of contraception, despite what “pro-lifers” want you to believe.

Every year in the US about 135,000 kids are adopted. However, only 59% of those adoptions come out of foster care.* In 2016 over 400,000 kids were in foster care in the US, so there are obviously more than enough children waiting to be adopted by loving families, many of whom will most likely age out of foster care without ever being adopted. Forcing a woman to have a child that may just end up in the system at birth doesn’t really seem like a real solution for anyone to me. And don’t even get me started on rape and incest victims… A double violation of our bodies, predators in different cloaks. I recently read a remark that said something along the lines of not punishing the child for the sins of the parents. This infuriated me, because by forcing the pregnant person to carry and birth a child conceived against their will is effectively punishing both child and parent, neither of whom asked to be violated. If an act of rape or incest results in conception, the pregnant person should never be forced to do something against their will. Trauma layered upon trauma.

Restricting and banning abortion practices is obviously not about maintaining and cherishing life, or even about birth. It is not about the existence of a child either. It is all about control. I find it interesting that so many right wing anti vax activists protest against the government forcing them to vaccinate their kids against deadly and highly infectious diseases, but are fine with the government restricting abortion rights. You can’t have it both ways, complaining on the one hand that the government needs to take their hands off our bodies for one thing but not for another. Then again both movements are filled with so much misinformation, ridiculous claims, and contradictions it would be laughable if it weren’t so serious.

Whether you believe that life starts at conception, or a heartbeat, or not, whether your religious or personal beliefs are against abortion for any reason, whether you believe abortion should be unrestricted and covered by insurance: I don’t care. These are your personal beliefs that should not be controlled or governed by another. This is what being pro-choice means: every person who can become pregnant has the right to make their own decisions about their bodies without being pressured, forced, or restricted in choice.

I chose to have my three children, but I don’t know now what I would choose now if my contraception failed. No one ever wants to have to make this choice, but for many different reasons they often do. Restricting and banning abortion just pushes it into back alleys and danger zones, it doesn’t stop it from happening. And despite what anti-abortion zealots keep proclaiming, we don’t use, or think of using, abortion as a form of contraception. For each and every one of us the choice is a difficult one that we will never forget. Then again, the reality doesn’t really fit the narrative of controlling us, does it?

Maintaining a strict divide between church and state is so important, and it works to the benefit of all. Abortion is not a political issue to be raised over and over again, it is our personal, very personal, choice and right, and belongs only to us.

Side note: The most recent season of the TV show Call The Midwife focused on abortion laws in the UK, and on illegal abortions. While it did somewhat sensationalize backstreet abortions provided by untrained professionals, and didn’t highlight the many doctors and nurses who safely performed illegal abortions at the time, it did bring up some very important points. Abortion was legalized in the UK in 1967, and most abortions are covered by the National Health Service, something that has never been the case in the US.

Side note no 2: Gosh it feels like we are constantly fighting for the rights to keep your hands off our bodies! I wrote this one in 2012, and this one in 2016. Sometimes when I reread content I wrote a few years ago I have to cringe a little, but I refuse to edit as, with anything, learning is a path. I now know to be more inclusive in my writing, something I know that I have failed to do in the past. The gist is the same though, my body, my choice, and none of your business!

*Numbers taken from the most recent AFCARS Report.

Empathy, Hope, Unity, Acceptance, and Self-Education

My writing is very disjointed at the moment, fragments jotted down here and there, slowly becoming a page, two, three, and then more. Each fragment is being built into another piece until they come together into something much bigger over time. Over the next few months there will be “essays” composed of fragments, all stemming from a project I started this time last year that took on a world of it’s own. My views, my observations, my memories. For me, for you, for no one in particular, for everyone. Today’s piece is a disjointed essay on how narrow-minded we are in general.

I started writing this piece earlier in December, while pondering on the lack of empathy, and the lack of memory in the general population around me. Maybe this is a result of having born witness to events from afar (through a TV or computer screen) but never having had to actually live through them? The latter has a huge effect on how a population views life in general I think, but it doesn’t excuse the apathy and disinterest in others’ well being. It’s easy to imagine what someone else, another group of people, or a population in general is going through, but can we really understand it if we only witness through a small, media-driven lens? When a lack of interest in seeking out more information is coupled to a lack of basic empathy, the ground beneath us starts to erode, revealing the filth of buried secrets. Then comes the sudden need to throw blankets over everything before we have to admit that nothing is the way we have made it seem for so long. 2018 should have been a year of great change, but it really just feels like a game of same old, same old.

I was reading through some Bush Sr. related coverage for work when I suddenly realized that Gorbachev was still alive. I don’t know why it surprised me, but it did. It certainly made me recognize, amongst all this sudden praise for a president who so many hated back then, that the world was such a different place when I was a kid than it is now. I was born in 1978, and was very aware of what was going on in the world from a very young age.  My family always listened to the news on the radio, and I was always encouraged to read anything I wanted to, to explore information, and to ask questions. There was also the fact that my stepfather came from a family of Polish immigrants, who had been displaced by Stalin at the beginning of WW2, and had no home to go back to at the end of the war. We talked, read about, and listened to, a lot of history, both recorded, and orally through individuals who had lived it.

I vividly remember being at the tail end of the Cold War, of the wall (Berlin Wall of course) and of Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, John Major, and of course, Mikhaïl Gorbachev. We were stuck between the US and the USSR, always wondering what was next. The 80’s still have a bleak feeling to them in my head. Cold, gray, threatening. My sister still shivers when she remembers our cousin telling us that there was a button that could be pressed by Reagan or Thatcher and once they did missiles would destroy the world, and we would be gone, burnt to a crisp. (Obviously we realized after a while that it wasn’t as simple as that, but yes, nuclear war was a threat).

These words still have deep meaning to me: Glasnost, Solidarnosc, the Iron Curtain, the Wall, the Cold War. We studied things like the Bay of Pigs and the Cuba missile crisis in depth, assuming that we had actually made some steps towards a better, more positive world. Do I see the world differently now because I know more, or because it just felt more simpler back then, the good and the bad, separated by a river?

Do you remember Ceaușescu? His name was such a household name he was always on the news and I constantly wondered why he appeared to be so evil. I lived in peaceful, plentiful (as opposed to the East) countries, but I was always intrigued about what went on behind the Iron Curtain. When I was very young I imagined a real curtain made of iron, descending with a crash like the gate of a storefront. I often wondered about my counterparts just a few countries away, children just like me growing up, going to school, falling in and out of love. What was it like to grow up under Communism? Was it the evil we were supposed to think it was? Years later we had a visiting professor from Berkeley at my French University, whose specialty was teaching US foreign policy from 1945. His lessons were designed to shock, to have us look at the USSR, even at Stalin in a different light, but we were confused by his tactics. We already knew how to think for ourselves, we didn’t need someone to tell us what to think. Still, he aimed to teach us that Stalin’s Communism wasn’t as bad as we were taught. I suppose none of his family members died in the gulags or in the pogroms…

My stepfather still had family members in Poland, and others in the Soviet Union; communication was only available via letters that could take forever, opened and read by censors (with random black lines through content), or scheduled phone calls that might or might not go through. We didn’t have a home phone when we lived in The Netherlands in 1988, a rarity, and we would use the pay phone down the street if we needed to call someone. My stepfather’s family members did the same, although their phones were usually the actual only phones in the area, and it was obvious all calls were listened to. I remember waiting and waiting for one of his cousins and their son to arrive from the USSR (now Belarus). The process to obtain visas and travel permits and back and forth was drawn out for months, and the day they finally were supposed to arrive came and went without a sign of them. And then suddenly there they were. We smiled a lot, as we did not speak Russian, and they did not speak English or Dutch.

There is an art to communicating when you don’t speak a common language, and I learnt it a long time ago. Most likely from moving to different countries and being thrown in the deep end so to speak: we had to immerse ourselves into everyday life, school, and friends immediately. You learn to communicate through gestures, looks, smiles. I suppose it’s one of the main reasons why my other half and I transcended regular communication even though we didn’t speak each other’s language very well (at all). Most people couldn’t understand it, but to me language has never been a border.

I also remember other family members arriving, these ones from Poland, and assuming we would be giving them a truck full of jeans and electronics to take back with them. They soon discovered that our roads were not paved in gold, and nothing was handed to us on a plate, but the abundance of everything was still overwhelming. When bread, milk, chocolate and eggs are available whenever you need them you don’t really wonder what it’s like to have to line up for basic necessities, ration book in hand, and hope that when you make it to the front of the queue there will still be something left to buy.

(My recollections of our trips to Poland before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall can be found here).

I fully believe we are too comfortable in our abundance, we often take it for granted. It drives me mad to see apathy in the face of possible change, where people watch a government chipping away at their rights and they are too comfortable in their abundance and apathy to feel frightened. Freedom is never a given, and there is always someone who wants to regulate it, take a larger part of the pie for themselves. Can you imagine the state breathing down your back, observing your every move? Having to skip through twenty hoops to get a visa to visit Canada or Mexico, or any other country for that matter? Can you imagine not seeing your family for years, speaking sporadically on the phone, not being able to get through when an emergency strikes, waiting in limbo for hours to hear some (good) news? It’s bloody hard, I can tell you. We take our guaranteed ease of communication and freedom for granted. We take too many things for granted, too much of the individual and not enough of the collective.

I think we all believe in stereotypes of some sort, but as individuals and as a society in general; we have to do the hard work of destroying them. How many times do you hear Africa referred to as one country rather than a massive continent composed of many countries, climates, people, customs, cultures, languages, and governments? How many times do you hear the US referred to as “America” when America is actually a continent comprised of many countries, cultures, people, languages, governments, etc.? What do you think of when I say “USSR”? When the current president spouts out stereotype after stereotype what do you do to erase the harm that it causes? When we refer to a group of people as a stereotype, and generalize them, we are just a step away from dehumanizing them. By generalizing and stereotyping people we are actually saying that they are “not like us”, which immediately has the pejorative effect of “us” being “better, easier, normal”. “Them” is not “us”. It’s a constant learning process, this push to “uneducate” ourselves from so much of the crap that we have been taught, to use our eyes, ears, and minds differently, with acceptance and empathy rather than fear and unfounded misgivings. Obviously we will make mistakes, most likely awful ones at times, but learning is what we must do in order to evolve into a better human race in general.

We don’t have much time left. We have learnt from history, especially very recent history, that walls, persecution, isolation, internment, and censorship are never a solution to any kind of issue we think we may have. We are not protecting ourselves when we shut out, censor and destroy the “other”. Today’s cages and walls, a death here a death there, are tomorrow’s failure to anticipate discrimination, mass murder and hell, and the following day’s frantic whitewashing of the crimes we committed the day before.

We can choose to say no more. This doesn’t mean waiting for the next election to save you, because by then it will be too late. We have to say no more right now.

Two children recently died in US Border Patrol custody, their names were Jakelin Caal Maquin and Felipe Alonzo-Gomez.

There is a conservative effort that at least 85,000 children have died of starvation in Yemen, and Saudi Arabia is hiring Sudanese child soldiers to fight for them in Yemen.

A 7 year old child named Jazmine Barnes was shot and killed while in her car with her mother in a completely senseless and horrific drive-by shooting. This will never be normal, so why did it happen?

Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered three months ago and the US has not put any pressure on Saudi Arabia for real answers. Are we slowly forgetting about this?

And people in the US are so afraid of the “other” that they have started their own fund to build the wall. It has reached over $18 million dollars… Racist bigots and their money, always going towards something completely dumb and unhelpful to the country they say they love.

And so on.

No More.

The Definition of Cruelty

The definition of the word cruel is “wilfully causing pain or suffering to others, or feeling no concern about it”. Separating children from their parents is just that: cruel.

I can tell you for a fact that no parent leaves their home with their child(ren) to make a dangerous and extremely difficult journey to another country for fun. It’s not a decision that any parent would make lightly. I’ve written about the border crossing experience before, a true life story from 15 or so years ago, and it’s not something that anyone does just because they woke up that day feeling like taking a little trip somewhere. The conditions of immigrant detention centers are a lot worse today, bordering, and frequently crossing the border of, inadmissible. Prisons are a major business in the US, and immigrant detention centers are also part of this business. People are held for days, weeks, years even, in cells and cages, some even in tents, in freezing cold and boiling hot temperatures, without the ability to communicate with family and friends outside the centers. I’ve known people to disappear suddenly and reappear again 6 months or so later, unceremoniously dumped on the other side of the border. What good is it to anyone to detain someone for so long for the sole act of trying to walk across the border? Because it’s a business, and many people are profiting from it.

Obviously immigration detention centers have never been “nice” places to stay, and undocumented immigrants were arrested before Trump was elected president. However, the spike in arrests and deportations of law-abiding people, people who have been here for decades, and the deterioration of conditions in detention centers are just some of the proof that this current administration’s agenda is more about dehumanizing the non-white immigrant, demonizing entire populations, and targeting those who are the most innocent, than actually making the country a safer place.

The family separation policy is not even a law, but already over 2,000 children have already been separated from their families at the border, breastfeeding babies included, in less than 6 weeks. The administration has created a loophole in the system, deeming that every person who crosses the border illegally should be prosecuted, and as you cannot let a child go to jail with their parents they are taken from them and thrown in detention centers, often under horrific circumstances. It is then up to their parents to find them and get them out again, usually with little help or recourse to help. Also, if you have been following what’s been going on in Congress for the past year or so you will have noticed that when it comes to immigration policies, hardcore Republicans have been using immigrants as bargaining chips to get what they want. Up until now it was the Dreamers, but you can be sure that it will soon be immigrant children and how they are separated from their parents. “If you give us the wall we will let the kids stay with their parents”.

We all know this is completely immoral, wrong, insanely disgusting, cruel, and abhorrent. I don’t need to explain why, because those who are up in arms about this know full well why, and those who aren’t are not only being gaslit by their government, they also won’t change their minds anyway. For centuries this country (and many other European countries for that matter) have been in the habit of dehumanizing races other than white in order to maintain white supremacy, so the sheer amount of people who are able to look away from the inhuman practice shouldn’t be that surprising. This should however just make us want to fight all the more to make sure these policies and this government are run into the ground.

Those who are throwing up their arms in mock outrage proclaiming how “unamerican” this policy is need to understand that it has existed for centuries. Children of slaves were taken from their mothers (while their mothers were forced to nurse white babies), Native American kids were removed from their homes and shoved into boarding schools or adopted out into white families. And this is just the US. I don’t think we need to explain how the Nazis in Germany separated children from their parents. It was one of the first things they did when they rounded up families. Or what Stalin’s officers did when they were rounding up Poles and sending them to Siberia in 1939-40. It’s not that we don’t learn from history, it’s just that we seem to refuse to believe that atrocities can happen again, so they just keep on happening, hashtag “no more” and “never again”.  

This isn’t just Trump though, it is also all of those people who are around him, all of those people who have been waiting in the sidelines for their moment to arrive. Remember, Hitler himself didn’t come up with the “Final Solution” (mass extermination of Jewish people): Himmler, Goering, and Heydrich were the ones who devised the main plans. We have to be aware of all of these people, some of which were elected a long time ago, way before Trump. Keep an eye on people like Stephen Miller for example. It’s in everyone’s best interest to know who is representing us. It’s even more important that those of us who are immigrants know who are representing us (and not representing us at all).

Saying that, I noticed something a long time ago, but it’s become way more apparent now... So many immigrants from Europe whose situation is considered “safe” lower their eyes and look away when you try to talk about immigration policies and human rights issues with them. They wave their green flag far and wide on social media, but if you ask them to sign a petition or join a march they disappear. I don’t think it’s because they don’t care, but their “safety” is a privilege that they don’t want to lose: “we are OK now, we can’t afford to think of others”. Thing is they never really had to fear ICE knocking on their door, never had to fear losing their children, their livelihood, their lives anyway. It’s a privilege that makes me slightly sick. There is also often that back thought of “well you know you could have done it the “right” way”. I’ve seen it flash in people’s eyes when I tell my story or when I tell someone else’s story. Privilege. Even as an immigrant it is your fundamental right in this country to benefit from freedom of speech, and you cannot be penalized for standing up against what is wrong. Every voice counts when it comes to rising up and fighting against injustice. A lot of what is happening in this country hits very close to home for my family, and I can’t just stand back and watch it happening just because I finally have a green card. No one is safe.

This is why I ask ALL immigrants to stand up and fight against each and every damning immigration policy. Especially those who have their green cards, or those who are naturalized. As I said, no one is really safe.

“This is what happens when you operate on emotions” is a phrase that caught my eye on Twitter this past weekend, a phrase voiced by a troll trying to tell us all that separating families is OK. But if we don’t operate on emotions then we cannot claim to be humans anymore, can we? If a child crying for their parents doesn’t make YOUR heart hurt then there is something intrinsically wrong with you. If you believe that one person has more rights than another based on where they were born then you are just perpetrating the hate that is rotting our existence from the core. If we use our privilege and standing to hurt and destroy others rather than protect and aid them then we are the problem. But staying silent and turning our heads away from everything that is happening makes us just as complicit. The only solution I see is standing up and fighting against all of this.

It’s not enough to just share articles on social media or talk about it with friends. We need to STAND UP AND RAISE OUR VOICES. Here are some ways to help. But really, keep calling and writing to your representatives, and ask them to support Senator Feinstein’s Keep Families Together Act. Even if your representatives are aligned with your beliefs write to them anyway: the more support they have the harder they will fight.

Apathy is the bane of our society. We have to be better at protecting each other.

You can read all of my immigration stories and articles HERE. If you are interested in having your own story told, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

The Darker Side of the City

Last week when I went down to our building’s laundry room I (gently) kicked the door open with my foot as my hands were full. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw a man as startled as I was in the room. He rapidly picked up his belongings as soon as he got over his shock, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. Not that many people use our laundry room at 8am on a Tuesday morning, so I’m sure the guy thought it would be a safe shelter. This wasn’t my first time finding a homeless person in our laundry room, and it probably won’t be my last seeing as our property managers can’t seem to do anything we ask them to do (another story for another day). I’m not going to report the gentleman for sleeping in our laundry room, just like I won’t report the couple who were charging their phones in there the other time. If you have nowhere to call home and all the shelters are full you are going to look for somewhere safe to rest your head, aren’t you? That said I have obviously requested that the lock be fixed in the building.

We live in downtown Sacramento and we know how hard it is to find a place to live in this city. The rental market is tiny, the supply is way lower than the demand, and rents have risen by 7.2% in the last year alone. We spent over a year looking for a place on and off, and we were rejected from every single place we applied to. It didn’t matter if we had excellent references and rental history, if we made X times more than the required rental fee. Our credit was never high enough, and there were always about 50 other people interested in the place anyway, so we never stood a chance. We got rejected the first time we applied for the place we live in now, thankfully they accepted my mother as guarantor. How embarrassing is that though? Neither myself nor my partner had ever required a guarantor in our adult lives before!! But we have a home, and right now that is better than many others who live in this city.

There are currently just under 4,000 homeless people in Sacramento, a city of just under half a million people (1,723,634 million if you count the entire Sacramento urban area). This doesn’t include all of the people who are couch surfing or staying in extended stay hotels. 56%* of these people sleep on the streets every night. In larger cities such as San Francisco (7,499 homeless out of a population of 865,000), LA (55,188 homeless out of a population of 3.976 million), and NYC (62,974 homeless out of a population of 8.538 million), for example, the issue is even more visible: and rather than getting better it’s just getting worse. Just last year San Diego was plagued by an outbreak of Hepatitis A due to the virus that transferred rapidly through the growing homeless population. Shelters are not being built fast enough to keep up with the demand, and physical and mental health outreach and access is appalling.

I’ve traveled a lot and I’ve seen poverty, I’ve been to places where the dead are picked up in the streets in the morning before the tourists see them. I’ve also been and lived in some of the richest countries in the world, some of which have amazing social safety nets to ensure that those in need receive a helping hand. I always wonder where the safety net is in the US for all of these homeless people sleeping on the streets. Why do I see all of these new luxury condos get thrown up all around where we live whereas the waiting lists on the affordable housing complexes run into years rather than months. Why has the city built a new shelter to house 200 people instead of focusing on building more affordable housing? There is no way we can afford to move when our lease is up in June, so we will be forced to pay whatever higher rent rate that they offer us to renew – so I can’t even begin to imagine how hopeless it must seem to someone who is actually on the street already.

I often walk around the downtown area but I’m always surprised at just how strange it is. My experience of US city life is mainly relegated to NYC where I experienced living in more rundown areas (Bushwick a decade ago for example), as well as more affluent areas (West Village). But downtown Sacramento is quite shocking in its stark black and whiteness: part brand new sparkling luxury, part boarded up, falling to pieces, abandoned locations stanching of piss. Take K Street for example: at one end there is the new arena, faced by the Convention Center a few blocks down, and in between there are bright restaurants flanked by old, abandoned buildings, a retro movie theater followed by an IMAX with missing lights, a dusty corner store followed by sparkling jewelry shop. And all along the road people standing, waiting for a new direction, or for the drug dealers, staking their spot to lay their heads. It’s terribly sad, and very confusing. It’s not just K Street though... Every single street in downtown Sacramento, and all along the riverbank there are makeshift tents, bikes laden with someone’s belongings, probably all that they have in the world, cardboard boxes flattened against steam outlets, people sleeping on the grass in the parks... Human shit mixed with dog shit, people who have been on the streets for years, those who haven’t, the loners and those who travel in groups, the addicts, the mentally ill, the ones you don’t know if they are addicts because they are homeless or mentally ill, or homeless because they are addicts. I walk through the Capitol garden early in the morning and men and women pick up their belongings, roll their blankets and sleeping bags up, and walk away. Sometimes if you walk home at night along Capitol Mall figures rise up in front of you, only visible when you hit a rare street light, and you feel like you may actually have landed in zombie land. But these are PEOPLE, human beings like you and me, and the country seems to have forgotten them.

The country also seems to have forgotten about their veterans. With the military budget being as enormous as it is ($700 billion for 2018) one would have thought that this country would look after veterans better than they do. PTSD can hit anyone, and it doesn’t always manifest immediately on return from a war zone (or proximity to a war zone).  Mental illness can affect anyone, whether they have served in a war or not. There are currently approximately 40,000 veterans living on the streets in the US, and another 1.4 million at risk of becoming homeless. We are failing these people by leaving them to suffer, after serving this country in the way they felt was the best. How can you push a gun into a young person’s hands and tell them to shoot, and then dump them out on the streets when you are done without any kind of psychological follow up? While services ARE slowly getting better, so many have fallen through the cracks. It breaks my heart to see these men and women sleeping rough in the parks, and on the sidewalks. The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans website has lots of important statistics, as well as information on how individuals can make a difference if they are so inclined.

I was walking past the Capitol this morning and saw the same homeless man I had found in our laundry room. He was sitting on a bench, staring into space. I don’t know what I can personally do about the situation apart from provide kindness, and food/necessities when we can afford it ourselves. Every so often we buy large Ziploc bags and fill them with socks, protein bars, toothpaste, sanitary pads etc, and keep them in the stroller basket to hand out as and when. I hope they help a little. But in the grander scheme of things we need to collectively keep pushing our representatives to take care of those who need it the most, and that includes families who struggle to make rent every month, families who have to juggle bills and are constantly paying late fees. If the number of homeless people in this country isn’t scary enough (just over 500,000), those living below the poverty line (40 million in 2016) is even scarier. How many of these people are one bill away from eviction or foreclosure?

We need better and more accessible mental health help, we need rent controlled and accessible housing instead of brand new luxury apartments that remain empty. We need to raise the poverty thresholds to ensure that people don’t fall through the cracks, and that parents don’t find themselves living in their car with their kids because they couldn’t keep up with rent and daycare costs. We need proper shelters that are open to everyone with real access to rehabilitation help, whether it’s for guidance on how to find a place to live, a job, an address, food, medical help etc. Because turning a blind eye to those who are sleeping on the street, in shelters, in their cars, or on a friend or family member’s couch is not going to make the problem go away.

*Figures taken from Homelessness in Sacramento County: Results from the 2017 Point-in-Time Count

I usually pop a camera into my bag every time I go out and last year my partner and I decided to work on a juxtaposition of photos of Sacramento, showcasing the many people sleeping rough on the sidewalks with a backdrop of luxury buildings, government offices, and hip bars and restaurants. I found it very difficult to randomly take pictures of people, and felt super self-conscious about it, so I tried to avoid capturing their faces directly. You can see the collection here.

Misplaced Fear and the Consequences

When I was a kid there was a wall that separated West and East Berlin, and I imagined the Iron Curtain was a real curtain, cutting one half of Europe off from another. I actually went to Poland on the train before the wall came down, and the experience is still stamped in my memory, even though it was nearly 30 years ago. A wall is never the right option, just ask anybody who has lived alongside one.

I realized a long time ago that it’s easy to feel a significant distance from a lot of things that are happening in the world when you live in the US, that there is a real false security blanket that you jump and hide under. It’s easy to forget about certain things because they are so far away and not on your doorstep… Sometimes it’s difficult to understand the reality of the world when it feels so distant. It’s not hard to find a small spot in this vast country that feels somewhat safe. Everyone needs somewhere where they feel like they belong.

But belonging is apparently only allowed if you tick the right boxes. Otherwise it’s just fake news, bad judgment, and rank with deception and disappointment.

You know, you think that you’ve heard everything; your skin is thick enough to deal with all the ignorance; words don’t hurt, they have no idea, it is their fault, but they don’t know ME or my family etc etc. But every day one phrase out of all of them lingers and chips away at your confidence, at your armor. You scroll through social media and you see one report of arrest and deportation after another, and these people are YOU. These families are YOURS. You don’t know them personally, but you do, you know what happens when one of you doesn’t answer the phone, isn’t home on time. You know the questions, the fears, the heartache, and also the happiness, and the joys. It doesn’t matter where we are from, we all get it. And with every person who gets picked up my heart hurts. I see people sharing the articles and saying how disgusting it is and how this can’t be happening here and how it’s not possible and this is not the US...

But it is.

I see comments from people I actually thought I knew, berating the fact that some politicians care more about immigrants than homegrown Americans, and I wonder if they actually follow what is happening in Congress, or do they just decide that creating a divide is more important than fighting the real enemy? A person who has been here since they were a year old and is now 30 shouldn’t be represented because there are still homeless people on the streets?! The logic makes no sense and I don’t understand why people even use it.

I hear the words, the backhanded comments that are made to ensure we know full well we don’t have the same rights as them, that we are criminals, that we made a choice and we need to deal with the fallout of that choice. I hear the words, telling us our kids are not as important, that we only had them to secure a spot in this country. I hear the unsaids, the looks, the fake concern, the “well you could have thought of that befores”... Why do you think we keep our distance?

I’m disappointed. I’m so disappointed. I’m disappointed in this country I finally thought was my home. I’m disappointed in those who still call themselves “expats” so they can pretend they are different from those who are immigrants. I’m disappointed in those who have become citizens and who aren’t trying to fight for our rights, because they don’t have anything to lose anymore. I’m disappointed in those of you who got married and are too scared to lose your own status that you won’t stand up for those who never had one to begin with. I’m disappointed that people won’t read through the bills and the articles and between the lines and understand that these immigration policies affect everyone adversely, whether they are citizens or not.

But my heart is still warmed by those who care; by the Dreamers who face the risk of deportation every day but are still out there, protesting, making their voices heard; by the real allies and the real friends, the ones who don’t roll their eyes when they see us share another FB post or blog post, who call and write to their reps every day; and by the articles and books I read that show me that we ARE important and that there are people who are willing to fight and stand up for us, especially those who have so many other battles to fight of their own.

I know I should probably keep my mouth shut and my head down and hope that by being silent it will all be OK. But remaining silent in the face of injustice isn’t something that I do, whether it affects me directly or not. This particular topic does affect me directly and it’s not easy to not get emotional about it, to remain strong and to still trust, to still believe we have a place here.

I’m not going to tell you to call your reps anymore. You can’t force people to be involved... It’s a hard lesson to learn, but also a necessary one. I’m not going to ask you to donate your money or your time or your energy towards a cause that you don’t understand or that doesn’t affect you directly. If you can’t stand up for the kids who stood next to you when you all pledged allegiance to the flag back in elementary school, then my words aren’t going to change your views. If you can’t muster up the energy to protest the deportation of immigrants who served in the US Army, then I doubt you are going to care about the cooks and cleaners and farm workers and nannies and everyone else that you don’t ever notice.

There is a lot of narrative around extraordinary immigrants, those who are going places, making huge differences, and while those awesome people should be celebrated we must also remember that all of the others, who often do the things that most people take for granted, those who work two, three jobs, are also human beings and deserve to be treated as such. Sometimes it’s easy to focus on the extraordinary and forget about the rest. Especially because of the narrative this government likes to parade around, comparing Dreamers to gang members, and all (non-white) immigrants to welfare thieves. NO human is illegal.

Where Is Home?

Where is home? I don’t know, it has changed so many times over the years. Sometimes it changes over the space of a day. You know, home is here, or home is there. Home is everywhere! But where is home really? I spent many years wondering this, yearning for somewhere else, nostalgic, homesickness just another part of my everyday emotional pool. I put my hands in, try to wash it away put there she is, wrapped around the reflection of the New York skyline or the Vercors mountain range. I close my eyes and there it is, my old boulangerie, the smell of freshly baked baguette right there in my nose. Or sometimes it is the bar on Orchard Street, the sounds in the walls when you walk open the doors, cool air, dried glass rings, the comforting smell of old beer that never goes away. Other times it is the churchyard in England, moss-covered tombstones, and names that have long since been forgotten by most. And then I imagine myself walking barefoot down the hill to the little beach on the Mediterranean, a mile or so from Nahariya, a few more from Akko. Home was leaving one home and landing in another, even when I had never been there before. Home was a suitcase in one hand and a cigarette in another, $200 in a bank account and a new life wherever I laid my head. Home is and will always be where I feel safe, happy, and with those I love.

The smell of rain on the warm pavement in the middle of the summer, a couple of swallows flying for cover into the eaves above my bedroom window, and the sound of the breeze rustling through branches and leaves, that is home. England in the summertime is home. Right there in the village where there is one main road and a few smaller ones, and two churches, the bells ringing on Sundays in time for the morning service. England is also the little room at the top of the building, with the grand staircase leading down to the rest of the apartment, cooking smells coming from the kitchen, the fire crackling in the living room. Home is the warm, thick quilt on Nana’s bed, watching television in the evening because I was allowed to stay up later than my sister. England is also living in London on next to nothing, writing poetry on my lunch break in Putney by the river; dreaming of Israel and California while wandering through the streets of Streatham. England is my first home, the home where I was born, and where I have returned to many a time. England is the comfort, the warmth, but also the grey and the dark. England is living as a working class family under Thatcher in the 80’s, but England is also rolling hills of green beauty and old, old pubs with real ale.

The unseasonably warm breeze cutting through the November air, leaves falling red, yellow, brown to the ground, but still t-shirt weather when yesterday we were in winter coats. Home is the Mistral whistling through the mountains into the valley, a city where the blue sky is tainted by brown pollution, nestled down between different mountain ranges. Vercors, Chartreuse, Belledonne: that is where I am from. France is nights spent sitting on the statue of Berlioz singing songs with a bottle of rose in my hands, hand in hand with my best friend, running through the cobbled streets causing havoc. Home is ivresse, home is warm bread and brie, ravioles baked in the oven, and countless espressos sitting outside en terrasse, no matter how hot or cold it is. Home is the relentless snow in the summer, and the snowcapped mountains in the winter. Home is opening your window shutters every morning to be greeted by the foot of a mountain, looming up into the sky, faces in the rocks, trees that turn with the seasons, somewhat oppressing, mostly a safety blanket. Never a real sunset on the horizon, sometimes I missed that, but those beautifully dramatic thunderstorms made up for it twice over. Dancing in the rain, happy faces, a kind of freedom from everything. Home is teenage years and metal and grunge and goth and friendships that last forever. Home is the most beautiful language in the world.

The smell of 5am in the spring, early morning jogger passing late night last caller, city that never sleeps: that is home. New York City, the place where so many dreams go to die, where so many dreams go to shine, is my home. A decade of decadence, a decade of wonder, of ups and downs and squiggly all arounds: a home that I never expected, but the home that I always craved. So many boots worn into the ground, uptown, downtown, Brooklyn, Queens, bridges and tunnels and subways and ferries. I can still find my way there blindfolded, the city sounds music to my ears. City sounds at night put me to sleep now, silence keeps me awake, ears craving the soothing sounds of sirens and cars, loud beats and voices travelling below my window. Home is the smell of laundry, bakery, trash, and stale beer all on the same block. Home is where love waxed and waned, and finally fell straight. Home is where my daughters were born, where the eldest took her first steps, and where life took a different turn. New York City: city where I lost and found myself over and over again, falling, crawling, standing up and walking tall. Home that haunts my dreams and my daydreams. Homesickness is the strongest with this one.

And now, home is here in this little city, capital of such a big state. Boiling hot in the summer, damp in the winter, wedged between desert and mountain, I suppose it is home. Home because we have a home, and home because my family is here. I still wander the streets like a stranger, one foot on, one foot off; looking for places we can make our own. We live in the bustle, but it is quiet, and we walk everywhere, every day. Past the Capitol where laws are passed and protests are held, through the gardens where each tree proudly displays a name and a history, up, up towards the real bustle, figuring out where we belong. I have known Sacramento on and off for 17 years and she appears to be struggling. Growing, but not fast enough, streets a mess of new and tumbledown, not enough room for the residents, K Street an image of the US that no one wants the world to see. Old Sacramento has my heart; the rumble of the wooden sidewalks as the stroller rolls over the slats, Evangeline’s beckoning us inside, memories of centuries lingering in the alleyways. I learn to love you, new home, the place where my son was born, but we will not be staying, our plans have many more horizons ahead of them.

Laced in between those homes are other homes, temporary stays that became more permanent, and forever etched into my mind. Barefoot walks to the edge of the moshav, running around the kibbutz at night… The little house in the suburbs, the place where I learnt what prejudice really meant, being spat on because I wasn’t blonde and didn’t speak Dutch. Biking to school, rain or shine, learning a new language in the space of weeks, months, little brains like sponges, watching, absorbing, listening. I still smell the Prasad in India, the overpowering smell of flowers on the tomb in the early morning, a perfect quiet, no one to bother me while I wrote and sketched. Sterilized water in containers outside of the rooms, perfectly crafted vegetarian meals, and people from all walks of life, a moment in time, ships passing through the night. That balcony in Barcelona, summer moon shining through my cigarette smoke as I listened to Cat Stevens and dreamed about coming back home, because those streets reminded me of home, of France home. My life is formed by a pattern of homes, all tracing backwards and forwards, down hills, over mountains, with many, many flights between them.

One day we will make our home somewhere else again. Another country, maybe one I have never resided in before, maybe one that I already call home. The wind has a tendency to turn and cast me off into all types of directions, heart first, the rest following right behind. If there is one thing I have learnt it is to never wait for something to happen, instead one should grab ahold of it and not let go.

Your Safety Is An Illusion

As a child I would curl up in a chair and devour books about WW2, Résistance fighters, Holocaust stories, and think about how lucky I was to be living in a safe country, protected by our freedom and our laws. I would listen to Tracy Chapman and Bob Dylan and feel inspired to become a real activist, always speaking my mind and never letting anyone put me down. As a young teen I delved deep into feminism and activism through people like Marge Piercy, studied the Civil Rights movement, wishing that I had been alive in the 60’s so that I could have been a part of it. I butted heads with my American history teacher during my first year at university in France, chastised for using the word “massacre” in an essay describing the battle of Wichita Village. There were no massacres apparently. It didn’t matter, I knew I was right, and I was stubborn. I sang to Bikini Kill and Hole, shy but ready to fight for equal rights. I still assumed that I was safe: privileged and safe. When I moved to the US I spent the first few years being proud to live in NYC, discovering a city that brought every part of me into a whole. I finally understood why so many people wanted to live in the US, and despite her flaws, she would be the place I felt the safest. Still, I understood how privileged I was, and how lucky: young working class white girl from England and France, running around the streets of the Big Apple, every opportunity available to me should I want to try it. I WAS safe, I really thought I was.

As I was putting the dishes away just now, relishing in the first moments of calm after putting the kids to bed the too frequent realization that we are NOT safe here washed over me. I live in a country where (just to name a few of the most glaring issues:

• You could be gunned down at the movies, in church, on the street, in a bus, at school, or anywhere else for that matter, at any time.
• Racism is institutionalized and constant: we may all have the same “rights” but POC still have to face racism and aggressions every single day of their lives, even from those who are supposed to be allies.
• People are called “illegals” when they don’t have the documentation that allows them to legally live and work in this country, even those who have been here for decades, or most of their lives.
• Women are in constant fear of losing their reproductive rights.
• Women STILL earn less than men, and POC women usually earn less than white women. For the same position and same job.
• Sexual harassment, assault, and abuse are still rampant in all levels of society, and the president has gleefully admitted to harassing and assaulting women on tape.
• When victims are brave enough to report assault and harassment they are usually blamed, their lives dissected and paraded for all to see, and finally made to shut up. Usually white, male perpetrators get a slap on the wrist, or become president.
• Immigration officials have no qualms about shoving 10 year old post-op kids with Cerebral Palsy in detention centers without their parents, or going into schools to check out possible undocumented fourth graders, or trying to deport adults who have an American parent, but whose other parent forgot to do the paperwork when they arrived in the US decades before.
• We are being governed by a disgusting idiot, most likely thanks to the Russians who have been on a massive hacking spree, probably infiltrating everything they can, in cohorts with the extreme far right wingers.
• Anyone can buy an assault rifle and use it.
• The current administration considers a median income of $450,000 a year as “lower middle class”.
• Climate change is apparently a farce, even though we are faced with the reality of it every single day.

So, no, we do not live in a safe country. We are not at war (unless you consider the “war on terrorism” to be a legitimate war), and there is no civil war raging within our borders. People seem to think that this country is still doing pretty OK, and some delusional individuals even think that this president is going to “make America great again”. But we are NOT safe. Our enemies could literally be anyone, even a neighbor who you say hello to every morning. While there HAVE been some isolated attacks by “radicalized” persons who were not born here, we have a lot more to fear from gun-toting homegrown terrorists than we do from ISIS. And we have a LOT to fear from this current administration, because everywhere you turn a liberty is being knocked down, and down every road you go a roadblock is being thrown up. It’s been a year since the elections now, and nearly 11 months of Trump, and it’s a LOT worse than even I imagined it would be. And I was considered a fearmongerer back then. I fear for my partner and for my children. I fear for my friends who don’t fit in your WASP box (which basically means 99% of them). And I fear for this country as a whole, and for this world in general more than ever.

I used to imagine myself working for the Résistance, wondering if I had possibly been alive in France in the 1940’s in a previous life. I used to imagine working underground during the civil rights movement, always on the run, always challenging the system. And now I find myself, at the age of 39, fearful for our lives and our safety, penning letters and articles and stories, writing faxes to Congress every day, calling representatives I don’t even have the right to vote for, planning escape routes to Mexico and Canada, and generally just wondering what else I can do to make us safe again. I can’t vote here, and even then I am beginning to wonder just how much of a difference it would make (that would never stop me from voting though).

And yes, I know we don’t live in a war-torn country, running for our lives while the government rains down biological weapons on our heads or holds us hostage in our homes. I know that I don’t have to worry about my children being trained to become child soldiers before they hit the age of 10. I know that there is no imminent danger of us all dying tomorrow from some kind of chemical warfare… But I will never feel safe here ever again. As much as we fight gun laws never change. As much as we talk about the benefits of immigration, people still hate us, as much as we talk about the decline of racism, it is still a very prominent and ingrained issue in this country, and as much as we talk about women having equal rights, we are still fighting for real equality. Gay marriage may be legal today, but in the mean time people are pushing through idiotic transphobic laws, and camps to “convert” gay teens STILL exist. So yeah, maybe we aren’t so free after all. And we are definitely NOT safe.

Please, for the sake of us all, do your part in the resistance. Because if we don’t all band together, no matter who we are or where we are from, we are going to wake up one day and find ourselves in a reality we never thought possible. And even those privileges we took for granted yesterday will probably be gone. We cannot let this happen.

(Do your part by voting in local elections today PLEASE).

Immigration: The Next Episode

I wonder if Trump sat down this weekend, rubbed his hands in glee and then said “I played this exactly the way I needed to, to get exactly what I wanted”. I suppose holding the lives of 800,000 people hostage while you force through some terrible immigration policies is the idea of a great day in the eyes of a disgusting right-wing fascist. That person who was elected as president in what is supposedly the “leader of the free world”? (not my quote). In any case, immigration is back on the table again after being benched for a week or so, and this time Trump has revealed his hand. For most people it might not seem like a huge deal so I’m going to list out some of the changes that Trump is pushing for and illustrate them a little. I do feel like I am preaching to the choir when it comes to immigration though, especially as those who don’t understand all of the ins and outs don’t really care to know anyway.

1). The border wall: this one won’t go away will it? Does he really think spending millions, billions of dollars on a concrete wall is going to make any difference to immigration? Humans are resourceful enough to cross the border as it is right now (desert, wild animals, psychopaths etc), so I doubt a bit of extra concrete is going to stop anyone. What a waste of resources that could go towards so many other things like: proper mental health care for veterans, including PTSD screenings for all soldiers coming back from a warzone, funds towards helping solve the opioid crisis in this country, or even funds towards inciting multinationals and large businesses to open factories in the US in areas of high unemployment rather than in other countries such as China. Just a thought.

2). Restricting green card sponsorships/banning immigrants from bringing extended family members to the US: this one hits very close to home. You can read my story HERE and HERE. My mother came here on a work visa in 2000, and my brother and sister who were both under 21 were able to join her. All received their green cards within months of applying. I was over 21, and therefore not eligible to join my family that way. If my mother had also been restricted from even applying for me then I would either not be here right now OR I would still be here without papers. I was super independent at 21, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to be able to visit, stay, and live near my family! When I came over too often I was threatened with deportation… Also if I decide to move to another country right now I will not only lose the green card I waited for over a decade to obtain, I will never be able to reside in this country again without going through the entire process again (unless I apply for citizenship of course). The idea is to stop so-called “chain migration” but honestly the waiting times for a green card to come through for a family member over the age of 21 is decades, not months. DECADES NOT MONTHS. Imagine if I applied for my mother to join me here today, she probably wouldn’t be able to come until at least 2027. That’s how it works. No one is bringing 20 family members over at a time.

3). The use of an e-verify program to ensure all employees are legally allowed to work in the US: I’ve talked about this before in a previous article, but in order to work in the US one must provide their employer with a Social Security Number. If you do not have an SSN you can usually buy a made up one (NOT stolen, that’s a very different kettle of fish), and use that. It’s very easy for the Social Security Administration to come up with a “no-match”, but no one does anything about it… Why? Because if they did not only would a ton of skilled workers disappear from the market, but also a LOT of money would stop pouring into the federal coffers (see this article for a great breakdown). So this e-verify program technically already exists, and nothing is done, so what would this change? I don’t think Trump really understands what the millions of undocumented immigrants bring to the US in terms of labor and money.

(As a side note to this I would like to add that the eternally repeated “immigrants are stealing our jobs and our hard-earned welfare money” idiotic statement just doesn’t make sense. If you are risking your life crossing the border to find work then you aren’t going to be running to the places with the highest unemployment rate are you? No: common sense would push you to go somewhere where there are many jobs, and statistics seem to prove this. Anyway, putting together a program like this honestly seems like a waste of money, and a great way to lose a ton of money too. Then again, not much in this administration really makes sense.)

4). Hiring more ICE officials, federal immigration judges and officials: basically Trump’s way of saying that they are going to ramp up round-ups and deportations by pushing them through faster. So much for the “getting rid of the bad hombres”, right?

5). A stronger policy to stop unaccompanied minors from entering the country illegally: Obama already created a pretty awful solution for this with the Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto a few years back, pushing Mexico to be more vigilant about their southern borders and stopping the minors from even making it into Mexico. So what are Trump’s plans now? Mass deportation? There has to be another solution, these kids are basically refugees, running from horrific situations back in their home countries.

6). Penalizing sanctuary cities: this is just so stupid, really. Like the bully standing above you, waving his little hands in your face, laughing while threatening to take your candy away if you don’t do what he says. Dictator much?

You know what the main problem is here? NONE of these points actually comes close to creating a sustainable immigration policy for the future. All they do is beef up policies to track people down and kick them out, and restrict anyone else coming in. This country has so much space, so many resources, and so much to learn from other countries. So why is a nation that has built itself on the image that it is a country of immigrants, a “land of the free”, and a place where everyone is welcome so scared of “the foreigner”? (Maybe add “non-WASP” to “foreigner” there). The fear of terrorism argument doesn’t stand up really because Americans seem to be perfectly fine grooming their own homegrown gun massacres, and the welfare-stealing/job-thief image is just a bunch of BS. Sometimes I read these awful depictions of what an “illegal” (gosh I hate that word) supposedly is, and all I can think about is that awful Nazi propaganda describing Jews in WW2. People really only believe what they want to believe – I hope you can all see beyond what this government is feeding you and the terrible prejudices that you have grown up hearing. My hope is wearing a little thin nowadays though.

Here we go again...

I am beginning to hate this country. When I finally said that out loud this morning I felt something snap inside.

It’s OK, I hear you all saying “well why don’t you just leave then?” If it were just me, I would. Setting up a new life in a new country has never fazed me before. It’s a little different when you have a family; there is quite a bit more work involved.

All day today phrases like "fingers crossed it won't happen" or "I hope it will get better" are standing out like giant beacons, my fingers racing to crush them with words, but holding back because what good is that going to do? The thing is we don't have TIME to sit here crossing our fingers and hoping for change. At every little turn there is something hiding behind a bush, waiting to ambush us. We look forwards, backwards, left, right, and centre and still get caught off-guard. And then we say to ourselves “well what were we thinking? All the signs were there from Day One.” All the signs were there, and now they are sirens, closing in on us.

DACA… So what is DACA? DACA is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, implemented in 2012, giving undocumented immigrants who came to the US as minors the chance to gain two year work permits, and therefore prevent them from being deported during that time, with a long-term aim of becoming citizens. You may also hear people talk about “Dreamers”. Dreamers is the term coined for kids that grew up in the US, went to school here, work here, pay taxes, but who remain undocumented as they were brought over by their parents as kids, often as infants. These people have no other home than the US, and deporting them due to their legal status would basically mean sending them to a country that they don’t know, sometimes even to a country whose language they may not speak. Many Dreamers don’t even find out that they are undocumented until they try to get their first job. DACA was created by President Obama’s administration as a way to help these people legitimize their status in the US. There are currently around 800,000 people enrolled in DACA.

President Trump has hummed and hawed about DACA for a while, amidst other immigration policies, threatening to dismantle it. This is a far cry from his “we will chuck out all the bad hombres” rhetoric seeing as these Dreamers are the opposite of criminals: they are law-abiding individuals intent on becoming law-abiding American citizens. The only thing that differs them from say, my children, is the fact that they were born in a different country. Ha, most of the Dreamers have the same nationality as my kids do (they have three, one for each parent and one for their country of birth). So why go after these people? Is it because he feels like he needs to dismantle everything Obama created? Or is it more sinister than that? Does he want to appease the disgusting racist agenda that he has surrounded himself with? Does he think that if he can get away with this then he can get away with anything?! If he can go after kids and innocent adults who have basically lived their entire lives here, then there really is no hope for the rest of us. But right now I fear for those people who put their trust in this country and who may now face deportation or going back underground again. I will be fighting to make sure that Congress doesn’t ruin these peoples’ lives. These people put their trust in the system, and now it’s turning its back on them. We have to resist this, just like we have to resist every other bed of thorns they throw our way.

(Even today in Sacramento there was a protest, small but loud, echoing through the streets downtown to the Capitol… We ALL will be heard).

I know you probably feel for people getting deported, but so many of you shrug your shoulders and move along, not really wondering what happens to the children and the other family members of those deported. It doesn't really affect you, there are more important issues to fight for, and deep down you think "well they had a chance to make it right and never did, didn't they?” It's OK to admit that you don’t really understand how the system works and that you never thought about it before. But please try to educate yourself on the ins and outs of immigration policies in this country and why so many people remain right there in front of you in the shadows. I wrote an article a few months ago detailing some of the most common myths I saw being recycled here there and everywhere, setting the record straight, and I realize now that I was just preaching to the choir. Those who believe Trump and his cronies are doing the right thing won’t listen to the truth, they just want to sit and wallow in a sea of crap because it suits their disgusting racist white America agenda. So instead of trying to set the record straight we now fight.

In the meantime, while I write and call and protest, and write some more, I also sit here and devise escape plans and customize emergency strategies in case we need them. Phone numbers, lawyers, friends we can trust. Passports, birth certificates, important papers in duplicates "just in case". Ever since Election Day I have known that this day was bound to arrive, it’s just happening a lot faster than I imagined. So please, no more finger crossing and hoping, because if those had helped us in the past we wouldn’t be in the situation we are today.

#IAmAnImmigrant

A Lack of Collective Memory

Earlier this week I was telling the Cesar the story of my amazing Nana and her many husbands and children, and we were talking about why I have Canadian citizenship in addition to being British. My Nana remarried just after WW2 (she divorced her first husband after he ran off with a nurse during the war), and she married a Welsh man who was also a naturalized Canadian citizen. Off they went to Canada, where my father was born, and then, before he even knew how to walk, they sailed back to England again, where they all stayed until they died. I love telling this story because it always makes me feel happy to relive my Nana’s adventures. Anyway, out of the blue Cesar asked me, very seriously, “but why did so many people want to leave England then?!”

Anyone who grew up in Europe can easily answer that question. In 1945 the continent was devastated after years of Nazi occupation and decimation, as well as tremendous bombing carnage from both Allied and enemy sides. England, while never invaded, had survived through 6 years of war, food rationing and bombings, where streets and towns and cities had disappeared into rubble. Everyone knew someone who had died, family members disappeared, children came home after being evacuated to parents they hadn’t seen in years. The lucky ones who had managed to make it across the Channel before the Germans occupied the mainland Europe searched frantically for loved ones, usually to be found as ashes at the bottom of a crematorium or thrown at the bottom of a mass grave. Europe was full of refugee camps and people who had no home to get back to, for multiple reasons. The UK was full of ruins and needed rebuilding. Who could blame anyone for moving across the ocean to a place that had not been touched by the violent hand of war directly, or at least hadn’t suffered the visual heartbreak that Europe had? If you had the chance to you made it out. The vast expanse of Canadian land must have looked so refreshing to eyes that had witnessed so much devastation for years. My Nana lived in London and Kent during the war, and would frequently see the bombers fly over, and the damage that the enemy planes caused. It’s hard to imagine raising three small children in that environment, isn’t it?

It was such a simple question from someone who was born and raised in a developing country where life wasn't easy and immigrated to another in order to create a better life for himself. From someone who started working before he was even a teenager to help make sure his family was always able to pay the bills, and who worked hard enough to build his own house by the time he was 18. He sees England as the place where we would want to move, not a place where people move from. I see it as the place where I was born, and I can totally see why people would have wanted to leave at some point or other in the past few centuries. My mother took us all out of the UK to The Netherlands when we were kids because the 80’s had been so bleak for working class families and she wanted a better life for us. We left in a small blue van containing everything we had and crossed the sea in search of something better. We didn’t speak any other language apart from English, and I had never left the UK before. It was an adventure. No one seemed to bat an eyelid about us leaving England; we were probably met with a little envy on leaving, and a little curiosity on arriving. But we were still immigrants.

Cesar’s simple question had me thinking all week, and raised a fundamental issue that is always at the back of my mind: why do people question why others become immigrants? Why do my fellow British citizens throw their arms up in the air and complain about refugees and immigrants stealing all of their jobs and money? Why are US citizens, who as we all know mostly come from immigrants too, complaining about “all the immigrants stealing their precious welfare money”? Because not that long ago they were also looking to move away from where they came from, from a war-torn country, from persecution, for a better life. Why is it so hard to look at the bigger picture and actually understand why someone would want to leave their country of origin? I always read the same comment from people, saying that they “saw a refugee with a cellphone and if you can afford a cellphone then you haven’t lost everything in your life”. Despite the fact that that is SUCH a stupid statement, if you remember correctly, the Nazis collected (I mean stole) huge amounts of riches from Jewish families during WW2. Bombs don’t discriminate when it comes to wealth. And anyway, everyone has a cellphone these days. It’s actually cheaper to put up a couple of cellphone towers than it is to install miles and miles of telephone wires, so you know, you might find a starving family in Sudan has a cellphone too. Doesn’t mean that said cellphone can actually provide food, water, and protection from guns, bombs and people who want you dead. Having a cellphone in your hand doesn’t mean that the country you are fleeing isn't looking to kill you. It just means that you live in the year 2017.

So, not to go too far into a different tangent, why is it easy to imagine leaving a war-torn continent in 1945 but easy to dismiss those who are fleeing war-torn countries today? Before WW2 many countries closed their borders to refugees, consequently leaving them to face death at the hands of the Nazi regime and their enthusiastic followers. We seem to have forgotten the collective guilt we felt as nations looking at the pictures of liberated concentration camps, knowing that in some part we could have prevented this from happening. But no, instead, again, people are pushed away because of their religion, their colour, their country of origin. We look at pictures of devastation, of starvation, of death, in such a detached manner. Have you ever heard of Kevin Carter? He was a photographer who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his heartbreaking picture of a starving toddler trying to make her way to a feeding center while a vulture looks at her. This photo was taken in Sudan in 1993 and went on to haunt Carter’s mind (amongst other things), until his suicide not long afterwards. It also created outrage amongst those who saw the photo in different publications, blaming the photographer for preferring to take the shot rather than save the child. There are different accounts of what happened after the photo was taken, but this is beside the point. What did all those people, claiming outrage from their comfortable armchairs, do about the famine in Sudan at that time? (There is also a lot of that going on right now, as I type, so nothing has really changed, has it?). Why do we continue to look at pictures and reports with detached horror, but not feel the need to actually help?

I talk as a collective “we” here, as there ARE many people who DO help, who try to change the world for the better. But at the same time, our borders are still closed, refugee children are still sleeping rough in the bushes around Calais, parents are still digging their lifeless children’s bodies out of rubble, and people are still risking their lives, leaving their homes with nothing except the clothes they are wearing, to make their way to a better place, just because if they stayed behind their chance of staying alive would probably be nil.

So, I was able to answer Cesar’s question easily. But it opened up a lot of other questions, some that I cannot answer, but that always plague my mind. Why is it OK for one person to be an immigrant, but it isn’t for another? Who defines the “good” immigrant against the “bad” one? How do we easily forget what happened less than 100 years ago in our own countries? Where did this lack of collective empathy come from? Why can we not make enough room for everyone in places where we can drive for miles without crossing another soul? I’m going to do my best to raise humans who will not be driven to create conflict, amass power and kill others, but in the meantime there has to be some way for those of us living in relative ease (as in we are not being persecuted or dying of hunger) to reach out to others instead of closing our doors.