I read Hannah Dreier’s longform journalism about a 40 year old dad and 11 year old son in the small town of Mattawa in eastern Washington state. It describes how immigration enforcement encroaches on fatherhood, the tiers of status, citizenship, agency, and who the government and private sector extend guarantees to and who they deem as being lesser than, what Eddie Glaude describes as the value gap within the United States. Although written, the Dreier article harkens to the seminal documentary Hoop Dreams where race and class identities twist into a Cinderella storyline, though in this recent version the staggering sacrifices come within a preteen club soccer rather than a high school basketball team. The barriers and obstacles are unevenly distributed, similar to how William Gibson described the future, not in the 200-some pages of Neuromancer as I used to believe but (according to some place else on the internet) during an interview on NPR in 1993. The article is a testament to what Omar El Akkad summarizes on page 141 of One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This as:
The point, the fundamental prerequisite, is to say: Against those people, those lesser people, anything can be justifiably done. The point is to flaunt permission.
It is rare that the lives of the people deemed lesser by dominant culture are detailed and witnessed like this. Reading Dreier’s article also reminded me of the children’s book, Seven Pablos written by Jorge Luján, illustrated by Chiara Carter, translated by Mary Faye Lethem, and published by Enchanted Lion (of course), which I bought a dozen copies of a decade ago to wrap as gifts for the birthday parties for toddlers and early elementary school age kids. Someone attempted to dissuade me from giving that graphic story as a gift, but I was resolute and I could recognize that their attempts to discourage were borne of their own discomfort and anxiety. They felt that a birthday gift should be jovial, avoiding the hard truths and savage realities of life and the world early in the 21st Century. But, tgat was a class binary as I find jovial adjacent to or interwoven with savage all over the place. The dehumanizing of some people, some dads is everywhere in this world, and I want to instill in young people to nurture their senses to see, feel and note the savagery along with the beauty, particularly when they coexist. As Lama Rod Owens recounts, to hold the anger and love together, not segregated. Seven Pablos was graphic in terms of the brutality and savagery of mines, military, and migration and the humans who create and enforce the sheer savagery on the world we live in. I don’t watch many videos about the cobalt mines where thousands of men and teenage boys toil and die in the underground depths of the Democratic Republic of Congo scraping natural resources that drive the mobile phones fundamental to this disinformation economy. The videos are gripping and terrifying. The raping, pillaging, and scarring are horrifying. And yet, the rapacious systems proceed, seemingly unstoppable. And we are supposed to numb ourselves to the suffering of millions of other people so we can revel in the industrialized world.
I’ve got to remember this story of Luis, the father, and Rooney, his son; how youth soccer binds them together more than the mop-ups of his father’s firefighting career can pollute his eyes and toxify his circulatory system. It’s a story of the arbitrariness of who is relegated to go mop-up embers from a mountainside by hand. The absurdities of systems where one class of workers is guaranteed medical insurance when diagnosed with cancer while a different class of workers, sweating and inhaling carcinogens, has no support, coverage, or protection other than the shared collection of other working class people, collecting money into a basket during a church service or by knocking on doors or pooling thousands of dollars through a crowdfunding site to pay for eye injections and prescription drugs attempting to lessen leukemia from overrunning a dad’s body. It’s no wonder that in this society of the haves and have nots that GoFundMe is the third largest provider of health insurance in the country. No wonder that some haves are confounded why Luigi became a meme, a superhero, a darling, and a sex object transformed into a David in this world of Goliaths.
This story of Luis and Rooney merits repeating, a mythology according to:
- “That way if they rip it up, I’ll still have it,”
- “I can’t answer that.”
- “Are you gonna take him? Won’t there be ICE there?”
- “I know I’m sick again. I can feel it.”
- “It’s just us,” he said. “I have to make sure he stays on a good path.”
- “It’s the only thing I have to give him,”
- The jersey that says James on the back.
How we humans live and behave towards each other is stranger than fiction. This is what we do.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 