'Once to Every Soul and Nation':
Martha and Waitstill Sharp and the Legacy of Moral Courage
Even last October, however,
before Paris, before San Bernardino, before all the rest of it, we were
starting to hear the first whispers of the anti-refugee backlash that has since
become so ear-splitting in this country, even if it has never actually been the
most widely held viewpoint. An otherwise obscure Texas Congressman, Mike
McCaul, was proposing legislation that would have excluded Muslims from refugee
admissions from Syria. A chorus of right-wing voices was warning against
supposed “security threats” in the Refugee Program-- and this wasn’t only
coming from a certain reality TV star I could name. As time went on, the
accusations against refugees became increasingly outlandish. ISIS agents would
secret themselves away in the refugee program, we were told. Left out of this
narrative was the fact that people wait for decades or more in refugee camps
before they are admitted to the United States. Or that they must already pass through
a grueling security screening process that can take two years or more. The
facts about the refugee program had nothing to do with it. A seed of doubt and
fear and mistrust that had not entered the hearts of most Americans before was now
being deliberately planted there, and cultivated.
I recall feeling baffled that
we were having this debate at all. To the extent that I had ever thought about
the refugee program before – and I confess it was not often – I had not thought
of it as a political issue. And for the most part, it hasn’t been. Since the
Refugee Admission Program was created in 1980, it has largely enjoyed the
support of both major parties. There has been plenty of realpolitik, to be
sure, behind the question of which national populations were welcomed as
refugees in the context of the Cold War. But there was a solid bipartisan
consensus, along the way, that the United States had the resources and capacity
to be a leader in resettling refugees. So I had no frame of reference for what was
happening in this country now.
It was in something of this
mood that I was talking one day last fall to long-time parishioner [--]. As is frequently the case in our conversations, she did not suffer my
innocence on the subject for long. She assured me that, in fact, we had been
here before. In 1939, well after the nature of the Hitler regime in Germany had
become clear, but before it had entered its most genocidal phase, an
opportunity arose in the United States, she told me, to welcome 10,000 Jewish
refugees from Nazi Germany. It came in the form of a Senate Bill co-sponsored by
Robert Wagner of New York, and Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts. (At the
time [--] told me this, the second name meant nothing to me, but it has since
become familiar from driving past the V.A. hospital that is named after her.)
Now, this Wagner-Rogers bill, as I say, would have allowed 10,000 Jewish
children to come to the United States. Among them would have been Anne Frank,
whose parents had already petitioned the U.S. government for entry.
But the bill, as we know, was
defeated. Anne Frank was not spared from the death camps. As the Bill was being
debated, people stood on the floor of Congress to declare that “10,000 Jewish
children will become 10,000 Jewish adults.” So-called “patriot” groups lobbied
the U.S. government under the slogan “America First!” Sound familiar?
Anti-Semitism was rampant in this country. More bizarrely still, Jewish
refugees were accused of being the very things they were trying to flee.
Pundits in the U.S. warned that there would be secret “Nazi spies” smuggled
away amongst the refugee population that was admitted to this country from
Europe. Again, sound familiar?
We are often loath to make
these kinds of historical comparisons, of course, in part because we rightly
wish to avoid the invidious game of trying to weigh different evils against
each other. Is Bashar al-Assad the same as Hitler? we ask. No. But he has
dropped chemical weapons on the sleeping citizens of his own country and as we
speak is reigning death on the besieged city of Aleppo. Is ISIS a reincarnated
Nazi movement? Who knows if that’s the best comparison to make or not. What is
certain is that the so-called Islamic State has tried – and thankfully, not
entirely succeeded – to commit a genocide against Yezidis, Christians, and
other religious minorities, and against the vast majority of Muslims in its
conquered territories who despise its ideology. Indeed, of all the bloody
terrorist attacks that ISIS unleashed around the world last year, the most
costly by far was directed against Muslims – it was the July 3 bombing in
Baghdad that took the lives of more than 300 Iraqi Shi’a in a single day.
What about our own rancorous
politicians? Are they just the same as the Anti-Semites who refused entry to
Jewish refugees during World War II? Maybe not exactly, but they’re close
enough certainly to do them little credit. Not quite being Nazis is a pretty poor
defense to make for politicians like ours, especially when our government has
had a hand in creating so many of the catastrophes plaguing the Middle East
today – through our propping up of autocratic regimes, through our supplying of
arms and tactical support to the Saudi government in its current air war in
Yemen, through our own devastating invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The point is that whether the
form taken by oppression and injustice across the decades is precisely the same
or not, it has an underlying thematic unity. And by the same token, the moral
courage that it takes to resist it likewise shares a kernel from one age to the
next.
I am thinking of this, of
course, because we have been telling and retelling the story of Martha and
Waitstill Sharp the past few weeks in UU churches across the country, as Ken
Burns’ new documentary Defying the Nazis:
The Sharps War, airs on PBS. I think it’s safe to say that the Sharps,
along with Theodore Parker, John Haynes Holmes, Viola Liuzzo and James Reeb and
a handful of others, are among the bona fide patron saints of our movement. And
it is right that we should celebrate our heroes and martyrs. We need examples,
and not just warnings, from the past, to provide us with inspiration.
However, when going down the
roll call of the prophets of ages past, it is all too tempting to relegate them
to a kind of semi-mythical Golden Age. People were just different back then, we
think. “The Giants were on the Earth in those days,” as the Hebrew Bible says,
“[…] Those were the mighty folk of old, the warriors of renown.” (Genesis 6:4).
And as much as we tend to
over-idealize the past, we also – paradoxically – darken it by comparison with
our own time. Even as we assume that Martha and Waitstill Sharp, staring out
from their black-and-white photographs, did things that none of us could do, we
also speak as if they faced crises, cruelties, and savageries in their time
that never could arise in ours.
I think 2016, though, is a
year in which we are finally start to speak in a different idiom. We are
turning to our exemplars of moral courage with more than historical interest. The
dark ages from our collective past are erupting again into our present – or
perhaps we’re just waking up to the fact that for some of us, they never ended.
We can see this in the refugee crisis abroad, or in the struggle for racial
justice in this country. The voting rights for which James Lee Jackson, Viola
Liuzzo and James Reeb died in the civil rights marches of 1965 are again under
threat in this country, in the form of discriminatory voter ID laws. The global
refugee crisis around the world today – affecting millions in Burma, Central
America, Africa and the Middle East, rivals in magnitude the crisis faced by
the Sharps.
And what about Theodore
Parker, whom we have canonized with the unforgettable image of him taking a
pistol into the pulpit in order to protect a family hiding in his church
basement who refused any longer to be enslaved? Well, once again today, there
are asylum seekers in this country who have to fear that they will fall into
the hands of federal authorities, and be sent back across the border. And, today
as then, we need churches, temples, and mosques that will step up and shelter
them.
With all this talk about dark
ages and crises, of course, it’s impossible not to acknowledge at some point
the specter of one Donald Trump, hovering over the scene. I want to be clear,
however, that he is not all I am talking about. Trump is just a particularly gross
example of a deeper pathology.
Our current president, for
one, while he has done much that is admirable for this country, has also played
politics with the lives and safety of refugees. When it comes to people fleeing
violence in the Middle East, to be sure, he has said many of the right things.
Though the 10,000 Syrian refugees who have been resettled in this country so
far is far too few, Obama has continued to resist Islamophobic rhetoric, and he
recently hosted the first ever Global Leaders’ Summit on Refugees at the UN
General Assembly in New York, to call for greater commitments from the other
world powers to resettling refugees. However, there was one refugee crisis that
was conspicuously absent from the President’s remarks in the lead-up to the
Summit. And that was the refugee crisis that most directly impinges on our own
Southern border – the mass exodus of Central Americans who continue to come to
this country in flight from organized criminal violence in Honduras, El
Salvador, and Guatemala.
I was actually in New York
last week, in the midst of the UN Summit on Refugees, for two events. One was a
UUA event that was highlighting the new film about the Sharps and drawing the
connections to our present era. The other was a so-called “Shadow Summit”
organized by a group of NGOs, of which the UU Service Committee is a part, that
was trying to draw attention to the contrast between the President’s welcoming
rhetoric toward refugees on the one hand, and the reality on the other of our
nation’s ongoing failure to provide shelter to Central American asylum seekers.
The story emphasized at the
Shadow Summit was a familiar one to me by now, but told in such a way that it
stung me afresh. It is the story of how immigration had become such a
politically toxic subject in this country during the fight over comprehensive
reform in 2013, that when thousands of Central American women, men, and
children began streaming across the border in the summer of 2014, they
were lumped into the category of “recent border crossers,” whom the President had already designated
as an “enforcement priority.” This meant they would be particularly targeted
for deportation. Seemingly for no better reason than that they spoke the Spanish
language, this mass exodus of people was not portrayed by our media as a
refugee crisis, but as a problem of “border control.”
The reality of the violence these
folks are facing is still far too little known. Over the past few years,
transnational criminal gangs have seized control of large parts of Central
America. Local governments have either acquiesced to their power or are
actively colluding with the gangs. The gangs, or maras, aren’t just a problem of law enforcement. They act like
quasi-states, and despotic ones at that, which forcibly recruit young people
into their ranks and threaten, stalk, and oftentimes assassinate those who
challenge their power.
Yet the United States has
responded to this refugee crisis with a policy, not of welcome, but of
systematic deterrence. Our government spent the last year conducting a P.R.
campaign throughout Central America with the goal of discouraging migrants from
attempting the journey North. We have provided funding and training to Mexican
border authorities to deport migrants, often without proper asylum screening.
For those asylum seekers fortunate enough to make it as far as the U.S., they
are locked up in detention centers while they fight for the right to stay.
Dr. Allen Keller of the
Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture spoke at the Shadow Summit of
what conditions are like for asylum seekers in the Berks Pennsylvania family
detention center, under this program of deterrence. Every fifteen minutes
during the night, he told us, guards at the facility approach each cell and shine
a flashlight on each sleeping family to make sure they have not escaped.
Imagine trying to sleep while having a bright light shown into your eyes four
times every hour, all night long. It is a method of policing that, in Dr.
Keller’s professional view, skates dangerously close to torture, in the form of
prolonged sleep deprivation. The only time they don’t shine the lights, he
said, is on a night when someone is being deported, because they are hoping the
other families will sleep through the deported one’s cries of protest.
Keep in mind that all of this
is happening after a federal court decision last summer declared family
detention to be illegal, and demanded that the government eliminate the
practice. The administration, therefore, claims that the Berks facility is a
low-security “family residential” facility, not a prison. But how many hotels
do you know where guards shine bright lights in your eyes in the middle of the
night, and only let you sleep on the nights when they are spiriting away
another guest?
In describing this U.S. policy
of trying to deter refugees from reaching safety, one of the speakers at the
Shadow Summit [Donald Kerwin] offered an unforgettable metaphor. “It is like a fire department
showing up at a burning building and locking the door,” he said.
Then he went on to suggest
that, more disturbing still, our government’s policies over the last decades
actually helped to engender this crisis. The two largest gangs in Central
America today, after all, the Mara Salvatrucha and the Barrio-18, trace their
origins not to Honduras or El Salvador, but to Los Angeles. They only came to
Latin America in the ‘90s, after a massive wave of deportations to the region.
Moreover, most of the countries in the region have to this day never recovered
from the civil wars of the 1980s, when the U.S. provided funding and arms to dictatorial right-wing governments and paramilitary death squads in El Salvador,
Honduras, and Guatemala.
In other words, we are not
only the metaphorical fire department that shows up to a burning building and
locks the doors, we are the ones that set fire to it in the first place. A
pretty lousy fire department all around.
I have to say that I was
feeling fairly low after hearing all this at the Shadow Summit. I guess the
event had lived up to its dismal name. It was a pretty uncomfortable time to be
in New York City for other reasons too. It was the UN General Assembly after
all. Dark SUVs were zipping by everywhere, with flashing lights. This was also not
long after a bomb had gone off in Queens, and the city was playing host to the
heads of state of most of the world’s nations. Police were everywhere, and there
was a palpable edge of panic in the air. Fear plus the usual god-awful traffic
does not make any of us into our best selves.
After attending the second of
the day’s two events, however, things looked different. This one featured Tom
Andrews from the UUSC, Ruth Messinger of the American Jewish World Service, Ken
Burns and Artemis Joukowsky and others. They showed the same clip from the Defying the Nazis film that we played
here two weeks back. I’ve now seen this thing ten or fifteen times at
least, but it still succeeds in sending a shiver down my back.
Toward the end of the event,
Ruth Messinger said something I had been trying to find the words for all day.
I think she was quoting someone else, whose name I now can’t recall, but oh
well – good things deserve to be passed around. She was speaking of this
feeling we all seem to have when we are confronted by people like the Sharps,
who showed exceptional moral courage. “We can’t help but ask ourselves, What
would I have done, in their place? But the question,” she went on, “is not what
would I have done, but what am I doing?”
That question can seem almost
blasphemous, when uttered aloud. Who are we to compare ourselves to the saints?
Who are we to measure our conscience against the heroic deeds of the Golden
Age?
In a weird way, it sort of
mirrors the debates between the early Unitarians and their Trinitarian critics.
The Trinitarians had turned Jesus into a God, thereby elevating him above
anything that a mortal person could aspire to. And this in turn proved for many to be a
conveniently pious means of sidestepping all those troublesome things that
Jesus actually tells people to do in the New Testament, like visiting the
prisoners and feeding the hungry and healing the sick. Well, plainly, all that
was just Jesus being his exceptional self. It’s not like he ever expected mere
mortals to do a thing like that! In fact, it would be presumptuous of us to
try!
The Jesus of the Bible seems
to have predicted that people would try a cop-out of this sort. “Why do you
call me ‘Lord, Lord,’” he says in Luke, “and do none of the things I tell you
to do?” This is essentially what the early Unitarians were trying to say as
well. By insisting that Jesus was a human being, nothing more divine than can
be found in any other mortal flesh, they opened the door for people who actually
wanted to take seriously the ethic he asked people to live by.
So let’s not repeat the
Trinitarian error in relation to our modern day patron saints. Let’s not deify
Martha and Waitstill Sharp, and thereby ignore the lessons they might actually
teach us for what we can do in the present.
For what it’s worth, after
all, both Sharps would have adamantly resisted the deification treatment. We
saw in our reading that Waitstill always insisted, “I’m not a saint.” Martha
Sharp likewise maintained that, in saving the lives of others, she was only
doing what anyone else would have done in her position. “Suppose I came to you,”
she once said in an interview, [featured in the new film] “and told you that there was a way for you to
really aid a family to survive – let’s say, for a week. I bet you’d do it.”
I knew upon leaving New York City
that I wasn’t going to let our Martha and Waitstill Sharp moment pass us by, if
I could help it.
Now, I’m not sure the words
of the hymn we just sang are right, when they say that only “Once to every soul
and nation/ Comes the moment to decide.” I tend to think we actually get more
chances than that. But there are opportunities
that arise in our lives which, if we don’t do them when the moment comes, we
will wish we had done the rest of our lives. We don’t want to pass up our civil
rights movement, our Defying the Nazis,
our Underground Railroad. We want to be on board that train.
We can do it. In so many
ways, we’re doing it already. There are trains leaving the station here at [--] every day. We are engaged in more timely activism in this church
today than perhaps ever before. [...] We are fighting to reduce our carbon footprint. We
are joining our interfaith sisters and brothers in the Moral Revival, which has
only just begun. We are showing up for racial justice. We are exploring ways to
get involved with the Sanctuary movement, and offer people shelter from unjust
deportation and the threat of persecution. There will be volunteer
opportunities to assist asylum seekers right in our own community.
These are exciting times, and
I feel so blessed that, of all the years in which I could have done my
internship, I was able to share these two in particular with you. Perhaps it’s
true the dark ages never left us. But the Golden Age isn’t over either. It is
now. Ours is the time of Giants.
Please join me in our closing
hymn, “We’ll Build a Land.”
Closing Words:
Our closing words are by the
great radical attorney Bill Kunstler, in an address he once gave to a class of
graduating law students.
Every person’s life has a moment when you are thinking of doing something that will jeopardize yourself. And if you don’t do it, no one will be the wiser that you even thought of it. So, it’s easy to get out of it. And that’s what David is doing [in Michelangelo’s great statue]. He’s got the rock in the right hand, the sling over the left shoulder, and he’s saying, [...] “Do I dare, do I dare?”I hope many of you, or at least a significant few, will dare when the time comes, if it hasn’t come already.
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