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Staying Home From the Protest When People Are Dying
It was 11:45am when I saw a friend post about the protest in downtown San Francisco scheduled at 12pm.
I wasn’t even fully dressed yet, I had to send handouts to the copy office for my class I was teaching later that day, and I had also planned to watch the Women’s World Cup game between England and the US before doing some grading.
If you’re a media sponge like me, you might have also woken up that Tuesday to read about AOC’s visit to the southern border camps, where women are being told to drink water from toilets, children are being left in cages in extreme weather conditions, and all in all nothing good is happening. Children are dying (literally), and all in all, no matter your stance on illegal/undocumented immigration, it is hard to not call what is going on a humanitarian crisis.
After reading about the visits and the inhumane conditions going on down there, I was filled with anger, frustration, sadness, guilt, and was pretty overwhelmed. It could be because two days earlier I had just gone to the Then They Came For Me exhibit (still up until Sept 1, and free!) in San Francisco’s Presidio, which highlights the struggles of Japanese American citizens who lived through the internment camps of World War II.
