Showing posts with label compassion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label compassion. Show all posts
Thursday, December 29, 2022
Friday, December 16, 2022
Caring for the Deceased, Caring for the Living by Bees, Desert Aid worker
I have mixed feelings about writing this piece about death in the desert.
Our organization is named No More Deaths; our stated mission is “to end death and suffering in the Mexico-US borderlands.” Death is central here, I know. But so much has already been written about the US government’s choice to use the desert as a weapon of genocide, and journalists have produced copious portraits of individual volunteers coming across deceased people at the border.
Let me first tell you, if I may, about the delight.
Let me tell you about getting my ass kicked in pick-up basketball by teenagers who had been walking through the desert for weeks. Let me tell you about how many times I’ve explained “Yes, you have correctly identified the English word for chicken, but Chicken of the Sea is not, in fact, chicken.” Let me tell you about meeting people who hadn’t had access to clean water in days and telling them (truthfully) that they smelled better than the ragtag crew of punks dropping fresh gallons and food around the Altar Valley.
Let me tell you about a man who had spent nearly a month trying to get through the Sonoran Desert on foot, whose eyes filled with tears when he spoke about the desert because to him the plants, the birds, the sunrises blossoming across the mountains, were all so wonderful. “The desert is beautiful,” he said.
In August, No More Deaths volunteers working around Arivaca found the remains of four recently deceased migrants. Death is central here, and yet none of the longer term volunteers can recall finding so many people in so short a time in this particular corridor. The desert is wonderful and terrible all at once.
Let me tell you, if I may, about the care and compassion of people in the desert.
One man explained to me why it’s difficult to report deceased people on the trails, even to humanitarian aid workers. “It’s dangerous, you know? If I tell somebody I saw a body, maybe they’ll decide I’m responsible for it. Maybe they call the police.” And then, risk be damned, that man proceeded to tell me where he saw someone who had died and made me promise that we would go look for that person. In fact, undocumented people reported three of the deceased people that we found*, ensuring that we could recover them quickly and help their families find a measure of closure.
When it would be easy to prioritize rage and anguish, I see volunteers prioritize care. People who have had traumatic experiences with law enforcement hike for miles with police to ensure a person is retrieved quickly and with dignity. Volunteers take photos of the surrounding landscape so families can see where their loved ones passed away. Atheists place flowers and pray. Cynical feelings arise in me and I wonder if these gestures are useful. Then I speak with a relative of one of the men who died.
I was in the group that found your loved one. We picked flowers and prayed for him, and for your family.
We pray for you too. Please, if you can tell me, what was it like where he died?
It was peaceful and beautiful. I know that sounds strange, but it was.
That’s good. That is helpful to hear.
Please let us know if there is anything we can do for your family.
Thank you for telling me. Thank God my cousin was found.
What the magazine profiles do not describe is that when we find people in the desert, we care for the people who walk on these trails, for their families, and for ourselves. They care for us in return, sharing food with us, sharing stories with us, asking how they can help us, and praying for us (forgiving any non-believers). Volunteers forgive each other for speaking clumsily and imprecisely, for responding from trauma and anger, for not doing and thinking everything with absolute perfection. One particularly hard day I share a feeling – that these people died close to where we leave gallons and it’s hard not to feel haunted by that – and no one shames me for it.
My fellow volunteers know the truth as well as I do. We could drop hundreds of gallons of water on every trail in the desert, and people would still die. They die because of settler colonialist violence, extraction economies, and imperialism. Because Border Patrol agents are paid to scatter and terrorize and kidnap people, instead of help them. Because horror is central to US border policy and no quantity of water can wash the blood off the hands of the people who write it. Because of a lack of care that is antithetical to so many of us in the desert.
I once met someone who carried a member of his group on his back so she could make it through alive. Another who assumed tremendous personal risk to ensure ailing people could receive urgent medical treatment. Another who reported a deceased person with the full knowledge that he might be blamed for that person’s death. I never found a way to contact the man who reported the deceased person directly to us to assure him we kept our promise, but I did run into a group who had walked the same trail. They were relieved someone cared enough to search, and then asked if we knew his name or where he was from. They intended to pray for him and his family. I told them we went to recover the body and saw that police treated the person with respect, and they asked me if I was okay.
Major publications construct a landscape of ceaseless adrenaline rushes – guides abandoning groups, cartels exacting exorbitant sums from the destitute, brutality of Border Patrol agents, death on the trails – and it feels like strange pathos porn, bordering on romanticization of the worst of humanity. What I would like to offer is that there is also care here, and I have seen the best in people.
I do not ignore or erase the despair in this work, nor do I pretend away the violence. Simply: I agree with the man who told me the desert is beautiful. If you have ever lost someone close to you then you know what this feels like. Your loved one is dead, light shines through the trees, a baby giggles in your arms, the world continues to turn, and the person you loved most in the world is dead. I was present on three occasions when we found people. There were wildflowers everywhere, birds singing sweet and clear around us, creeks flowing gently in the background. We cared for the deceased, and we cared for the living.
This is what I ask us to remember when we read other stories about the border, when despair and doubt settle in to stay for a while, when the challenges feel insurmountable and endless: many awful stories are true, and so are many wonderful ones. Terrible things happen, and we can provide comfort in spite of it all.
Death is central here, and care is all around.
Author’s note: I am a white settler who grew up in the Great Lakes region, not the desert. This piece is written from that perspective, and I intend to represent no one’s experiences but my own.
Our organization is named No More Deaths; our stated mission is “to end death and suffering in the Mexico-US borderlands.” Death is central here, I know. But so much has already been written about the US government’s choice to use the desert as a weapon of genocide, and journalists have produced copious portraits of individual volunteers coming across deceased people at the border.
Let me first tell you, if I may, about the delight.
Let me tell you about getting my ass kicked in pick-up basketball by teenagers who had been walking through the desert for weeks. Let me tell you about how many times I’ve explained “Yes, you have correctly identified the English word for chicken, but Chicken of the Sea is not, in fact, chicken.” Let me tell you about meeting people who hadn’t had access to clean water in days and telling them (truthfully) that they smelled better than the ragtag crew of punks dropping fresh gallons and food around the Altar Valley.
Let me tell you about a man who had spent nearly a month trying to get through the Sonoran Desert on foot, whose eyes filled with tears when he spoke about the desert because to him the plants, the birds, the sunrises blossoming across the mountains, were all so wonderful. “The desert is beautiful,” he said.
In August, No More Deaths volunteers working around Arivaca found the remains of four recently deceased migrants. Death is central here, and yet none of the longer term volunteers can recall finding so many people in so short a time in this particular corridor. The desert is wonderful and terrible all at once.
Let me tell you, if I may, about the care and compassion of people in the desert.
One man explained to me why it’s difficult to report deceased people on the trails, even to humanitarian aid workers. “It’s dangerous, you know? If I tell somebody I saw a body, maybe they’ll decide I’m responsible for it. Maybe they call the police.” And then, risk be damned, that man proceeded to tell me where he saw someone who had died and made me promise that we would go look for that person. In fact, undocumented people reported three of the deceased people that we found*, ensuring that we could recover them quickly and help their families find a measure of closure.
When it would be easy to prioritize rage and anguish, I see volunteers prioritize care. People who have had traumatic experiences with law enforcement hike for miles with police to ensure a person is retrieved quickly and with dignity. Volunteers take photos of the surrounding landscape so families can see where their loved ones passed away. Atheists place flowers and pray. Cynical feelings arise in me and I wonder if these gestures are useful. Then I speak with a relative of one of the men who died.
I was in the group that found your loved one. We picked flowers and prayed for him, and for your family.
We pray for you too. Please, if you can tell me, what was it like where he died?
It was peaceful and beautiful. I know that sounds strange, but it was.
That’s good. That is helpful to hear.
Please let us know if there is anything we can do for your family.
Thank you for telling me. Thank God my cousin was found.
What the magazine profiles do not describe is that when we find people in the desert, we care for the people who walk on these trails, for their families, and for ourselves. They care for us in return, sharing food with us, sharing stories with us, asking how they can help us, and praying for us (forgiving any non-believers). Volunteers forgive each other for speaking clumsily and imprecisely, for responding from trauma and anger, for not doing and thinking everything with absolute perfection. One particularly hard day I share a feeling – that these people died close to where we leave gallons and it’s hard not to feel haunted by that – and no one shames me for it.
My fellow volunteers know the truth as well as I do. We could drop hundreds of gallons of water on every trail in the desert, and people would still die. They die because of settler colonialist violence, extraction economies, and imperialism. Because Border Patrol agents are paid to scatter and terrorize and kidnap people, instead of help them. Because horror is central to US border policy and no quantity of water can wash the blood off the hands of the people who write it. Because of a lack of care that is antithetical to so many of us in the desert.
I once met someone who carried a member of his group on his back so she could make it through alive. Another who assumed tremendous personal risk to ensure ailing people could receive urgent medical treatment. Another who reported a deceased person with the full knowledge that he might be blamed for that person’s death. I never found a way to contact the man who reported the deceased person directly to us to assure him we kept our promise, but I did run into a group who had walked the same trail. They were relieved someone cared enough to search, and then asked if we knew his name or where he was from. They intended to pray for him and his family. I told them we went to recover the body and saw that police treated the person with respect, and they asked me if I was okay.
Major publications construct a landscape of ceaseless adrenaline rushes – guides abandoning groups, cartels exacting exorbitant sums from the destitute, brutality of Border Patrol agents, death on the trails – and it feels like strange pathos porn, bordering on romanticization of the worst of humanity. What I would like to offer is that there is also care here, and I have seen the best in people.
I do not ignore or erase the despair in this work, nor do I pretend away the violence. Simply: I agree with the man who told me the desert is beautiful. If you have ever lost someone close to you then you know what this feels like. Your loved one is dead, light shines through the trees, a baby giggles in your arms, the world continues to turn, and the person you loved most in the world is dead. I was present on three occasions when we found people. There were wildflowers everywhere, birds singing sweet and clear around us, creeks flowing gently in the background. We cared for the deceased, and we cared for the living.
This is what I ask us to remember when we read other stories about the border, when despair and doubt settle in to stay for a while, when the challenges feel insurmountable and endless: many awful stories are true, and so are many wonderful ones. Terrible things happen, and we can provide comfort in spite of it all.
Death is central here, and care is all around.
Author’s note: I am a white settler who grew up in the Great Lakes region, not the desert. This piece is written from that perspective, and I intend to represent no one’s experiences but my own.
Wednesday, November 23, 2022
Anxiety, Gratitude, and Compassion with Better Than I Deserve
I am still picking up on the Better Than I Deserve Youtube channel. I think that the guy hosting this knows what he's talking about and I think that he's orienting towards people struggling with substance abuse disorders, recovery, and the kind of stress working-class people go through every day. These are short videos with lots in them. Please join me in checking him out and learning together.
Gratitude
Dealing with anxiety
Compassion
Thursday, November 17, 2022
Sunday, November 6, 2022
.jpg)
Sunday, October 30, 2022
Raising Lazarus by Beth Macy and what compassion looks like as policy
The following are some quotes taken from the book Raising Lazarus by Beth Macy. You may be familiar with her book Dopesick or the Hulu series by the same name. I believe that Raising Lazarus is a needed starting point for people who want to do healing and create new policy paths in our communities and in the United States. The crises of substance use disorders and opioid use disorders are linked to other social crises as well. The problems our families and communities are facing every day are linked to one another, making these crises systemic. But if we going to wait to become experts ourselves, or depend on so-called experts and leaders, before taking action things are going to get much worse. Raising Lazarus gives us the starting points that we need. Think of this book as a compass.
One of our primary problems is in our lack of compassion for people who suffer with substance use disorders and opioid use disorders and their families. Many of us hold to the ideas that someone has to hit bottom before they will want or deserve help, that some people are beyond help, that there should be high barriers to people seeking help, that these disorders are moral failings, and that imprisonment is the best and most socially beneficial form of treatment. Macy makes a good point in her book that when we talk in these terms it is often our own trauma speaking and that the decades-long war on drugs and that trauma are costing us our compassion. This trauma and our lack of compassion, then, excuse us from helping others and saving lives.
Here are some quotes from the book with page numbers given from the hardback edition (Little, Brown and Company; New York, 2022).
Page xiii: Within the first pandemic year, the overdose count was 29 percent higher than the year before, and the numbers kept climbing. By late 2021, it was clear that addiction had become the No. 1 destroyer of families in our time, with almost a third of Americans reporting it as a serious cause of family strife, and drug overdoses claiming the lives of more than 100,000 Americans in a year---more than from car crashes and guns combined.
Page xvii: in a country that spends five times more to incarcerate people with (substance use disorder) than it does to treat their medical condition, progress was stagnant. In 2019, an estimated 18.9 million Americans in need of treatment didn't receive it. That's a treatment gap of roughly 90 percent. Among the lucky few who do get treatment, Black patients were far less likely than Whites to have access to lifesaving buprenorphine...a medicine that blocks opioid cravings...
Page xv: In Charleston, West Virginia, complaints about vagrancy and needle litter outside the public health department's needle exchange led to its closure in 2018, sparking a 1,500 percent increase in HIV.
Page 13: At one community meeting Mathis attended...a historic-district leader complained repeatedly that her neighborhood had been overtaken by people engaging in around-the-clock drug deals. "We need to tear down those houses and abolish the Fourth Amendment so police can do what they need to do," the woman said.
Mathis listened patiently to a range of stigma-inflicted comments. But at the mention of of abolishing the Fourth Amendment she stood..."Y'all, I just have to ask: Do you know the song, 'They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Love'? Well, I'm not feeling the love in this room right now."
Mathis reminded them that that Jesus tended first to people's physical needs because he understood that folks who were tired, hungry, and hurting "wouldn't have ears for what he needed to say." When the civic leader persisted, Mathis politely suggested she fix her neighbors a casserole---people who use drugs sometimes forget to eat, she explained.
Page 72: Fentanyl was present in more than 60 percent of the 2020 overdose deaths reported by the CDC, a quadrupling of the portion it accounted for in 2015. By June of 2021, mortality kept rising as fentanyl and other synthetics were involved in a whopping 87 percent of opioid deaths and 65 percent of all drug overdose deaths.
Page 89: Between 1999 and 2019, the gap between rural and urban death rates almost tripled, growing from 62 per 100,000 to 169.5. That death-rate disparity was bigger now than the disparity between Black people and White people, which academics pinned not just to deaths of despair but also to poor nutrition, lack of exercise, smoking, and uneven access to quality medical care.
Whether they meant to or not, people were literally killing themselves as the hyper-polarized government they hated stood by, and politicians who professed to lead them were engulfed in culture wars about transgender bathroom rights, Stonewall Jackson statues, and critical race theory. "People are making a virtue of going it alone and not depending on anyone, almost as a kind of self-protection," Silva told me.
Or as Nikki put it: "Rigid thinking is what it is, and that's a trauma response."
Page 256: But anyone with walking-around sense now understood that shipping 100 million opioid doses to a county with a population of just 90,000 was not acting in the best interests of that community. Huntington (West Virginia), a small city an hour west of Charleston, had the highest overdose-death rate of any community in the nation.
In 2016, Huntington-based EMS workers had responded to twenty-six heroin overdoses in less than four hours. One in five babies born at the local hospital was exposed to addictive substances. Foster-care placements doubled, and the school system had to install a twenty-four-hour hotline so that the police and schools could communicate about students living in homes where parents had (substance use disorder). The high school now has a dedicated space where traumatized teens can go if they need to talk to an adult or just be alone, no questions asked.
Page 275: People with (substance abuse disorders) are still ignored by policy makers when they often have the most knowledge to offer about their conditions, said Baltimore addiction specialist Yngvild Olsen, who cited a recent survey of 900 people with (substance abuse disorders). Their top three goals, in order, were: staying alive, reducing harmful substance use, and improving mental health.
Macy provides a few pages of needed policy and political changes at the end of the book. None of them will solve all of the problems quickly, but they all fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. When that puzzle has been put together we will see one another and what is within us more clearly. Policy is a test of faith. Can we raise people from the tombs we have consigned them to or not? Is resurrection possible or is it a fable? Macy and the stone-rollers who she writes about believe in resurrection. Do you?
Saturday, September 3, 2022
"Out Among The Stars"--Hazel Dickens
I know that many people have done versions of this song. Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings did especially memorable versions. But today I heard the version done by Hazel Dickens and it moved me. I have not heard it in many years. I think that this song explains so much of what we see on the news these days. Think a good thought for the people on both sides of the gun because neither side is the right side. If you're one of us who is getting weary bearing your burdens and your scars please talk itr out with someone and get some help.
Wednesday, July 13, 2022
Wednesday, June 1, 2022
"We are surrounded by signs and wonders...
"We are surrounded by signs and wonders. Each day they appear right before us and in places we least expect. A string of little coincidences. A sudden connection between two points. A blast of inspiration. The Spirit sends us signals, signs along the trail, to keep us pointed in the right direction. The Spirit provides what we need. The Spirit offers us a chance to use our imagination. We see wondrous acts of love and courageous acts of mercy. We realize we are part of something much bigger than any one vision can convey."
--The Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston, Native American/Indigenous Ministries of the Episcopal Church
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
Thursday, May 5, 2022
Wednesday, April 27, 2022
Saturday, April 23, 2022
Monday, April 18, 2022
Scream if you have to...
We return to a suffering world after celebrating Easter. Sins are forgiven, reconciliation abounds, we have an opportunity to try again---or I hope that we do. Please don't crash and burn when you meet the hard wall that sometimes is life. We're human, and we have human joys and sorrows. Some days begin with tears and end in laughter. If you can't carry your burdens, ask for help. Everyone makes mistakes, but try to put your mistakes and those of others in perspective. It may help to take every mistake as an opportunity to learn how to analyze without over-thinking. Try living in an "I get too..." instead of a "I have to..." world as much as you can. This is is really difficult if you work for a living or have a family or responsibilities to others, but some of your responsibilities liberate you and strengthen you and give you much to be proud of. Ask yourself if you can make what you have to do into an art or into something of beauty.
~Bob Holmes
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)