Ours was not an easy faith. The Sunday churches, I believed, focused on fun things like coffee hour, incense, colored stoles or, fascinatingly, ellipses – God, after all, Was Still Speaking… We got stuck focusing on guilt and eschatology, a bulky box with awkward corners and no lack of obviousness. WE knew how the world would end. We were the ONLY ones who knew. They would turn on us, before it was over.
No lack of wariness attended my religious education, but a child’s mind is flexible and bends around corners. “But, why would they all turn on us? Is it going to be like God hardening Pharaoh’s heart? But, why do people have to track us down and persecute us? But, what about the Channel 9 People? Wouldn’t the people who give to public television or who were hippies like our neighbors help us hide? How come nobody would help us when they helped Anne Frank?” Nothing of the broad strokes, black and white words we heard could gain purchase against our questioning imaginations. With no one to ask, my sister and I whispered in our bunk beds, hatching theories how we could escape.
But first they came for the *Muslims.
Rumeysa Ozturk
Mahmoud Khalil
Yunseo Chung*
Badar Khan Suri
Leqaa Kordia
Ranjani Srinivasan*
Alireza Doroudi
Dr. Rasha Alawieh
Momodou TaalKilmar Abrego Garcia*
WRONGFUL
Hiding their faces
Cold-hearted malignancy
Called it an arrest,
Claimed legal right to violence
Mute, we failed to even pray.
Some of the listed are not Muslim but it is notable that many people taken by ICE are.