Bob Marley and the Wailers | Protest Archives closures |

Friends,

I can't believe it is August! I insist that summer lasts all the way through September.

Still I have three more weeks before I start my travel routine again. Quilting, the pool, games with friends.

-Liz

Separation is Violence

We are meant to live in community. We are meant to be with others.

I was just at the Episcopal Province V gathering in Kalamazoo Michigan. We opened with a presentation by local tribes telling their stories of attending the Native Schools in the area. They were open until 1983!

The information on Native Schools was not new to me, I've seen it in museums and read about it. But this presentation was different--it was real women, right here in the room with us, telling about what they experienced. It was honest and raw and pierced my heart. I was glad I was there with other people to hear it; the crowd was almost a protection against believing the worst of the words I heard.

What struck me later was this: even if the schools had been wonderful, kind, and loving, the experience of separation itself is violence. If we took children from their parents and gave them an exemplary education at a location with good food, non-violent discipline, plenty of time outside, excellent clothing, even love and kindness, that would not make up for the separation of these children from their families. It would not make up for separating these children from their language, their foods, their history, and their culture.

And that brought to my mind all the ways that we have enforced separation on humans. We took people from their homelands by force and separated from their language, their culture, and their families. Slave parents separated from spouses and children. People with disabilities separated from their communities and sent to institutions, in the long past, and newly, again, today.

In Nazi Germany people were first identified as "other" and then separated from their neighbors into ghettos and then camps, and then death camps. A family separation policy as part of US immigration, with children in cages without their parents. And now deportations of parents, separating them from their children.

Radical welcome is important because it says yes to whoever shows up at our door, but somehow we have created neighborhoods and communities where almost everyone is the same race. This segregation keeps us separated from each other, and when separated we do not build relationships.

These are all symptoms of unfettered individualism. In a belief that individuals should, and do, stand alone. That loneliness is sold to us as positive--that we are stronger if we can take care of everything ourselves. Lone heroes are called upon to save us. Lone entrepreneurs apparently create wealth with no help from employees, investors, or even a family that got them started. In some ways we sound like three year olds stamping our feet and insisting that we can do it ourselves.

But it is no accident that solitary confinement is a punishment. We actually know that forced separation is evil. Even as we lift up the myth of individualism we know that we need each other. We know that together we can go further than any of us can go alone.

The mythology of this age is that those other people are so different from us that there is no room for conversation, no possibility of dialogue, no way to find common ground. We must not give in to this myth. We must recognize that the answer for how to move forward will only come when we work together.

As a church, as a neighborhood, yes, as individuals, it is important that we keep emphasizing community. Keep asking how items affect us rather than me. Keep finding ways to talk to people who disagree with us. Keep looking for projects we can do together. And certainly to stand up for, stand next to, work to defend anyone who is identified as separate.

How does your congregation work against individualism? Reply to this email to let me know. ​
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One way to separate others is to remove us from the records of what has happened. Federal funding has been reduced or dropped from many archives, threatening closure and eliminating access to records. The national archives in Chicago, with many records of Indian Schools, is on the list of archives to be closed.

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