Since I was a child, I have wondered what it would have been like to live at different times in history. Specifically, what would I have done if I lived in the time of slavery, or Jim Crow, or the Third Reich? (Assuming that in this imagined time travel scenario I would still be Jewish and queer, in the Third Reich I would most likely be doomed).
I think this is a common line of self-inquiry. What would I have done? Would I have risked my safety to help others? Would I have marched with Dr. King?
Well, now we don’t have to wonder. What we would have done in those brutal and terrifying times is what we are doing today. We have some beautiful examples right here in our own community. A couple weeks ago, a friend and I drove up to Williston on a Friday morning to be part of a demonstration outside the ICE facility in the White Cap Business Park. Commonly called the ICE Spy Center, this unassuming office building houses the surveillance infrastructure that ICE uses to search for immigrants to target, detain, brutalize, incarcerate and deport.
My friend and I drove up to join a dozen or so Vermont clergy people, seven of whom were arrested for blocking the doors of the facility. When we arrived, other clergy were standing outside the building, reading names of people killed by ICE over the past weeks and months. Some of the names read were people shot dead by ICE agents, some were people who died in custody, deprived of medical care. It’s hard to even type these words. Please take a deep breath with me. This is the United States of America today.
While we stood outside the facility, holding signs that said, “People Are Not Targets” and “Separating Families is Evil,” we sang freedom songs. We sang to help each other stay unified, to remind one another why we are demonstrating and to connect with our own hearts.
One of the songs we sang was written by the singer Abigail Bengson, who grew up right here in Addison County. The first verse of the song comes from the Statue of Liberty. It says, “Bring me your tired, your poor. Your masses who yearn to breathe free. I’ll hang my lamp by the Golden Door — Will you come to me?”
The second verse by Abigail says, “And if you come for my neighbor, from Mexico or Venezuela… If you come for my neighbor, you’re gonna have to come through me.”
We have been singing this song at many demonstrations, at multiple facilities, during this ramp up of ICE brutality over the past year. And we were singing it when the Vermont State Police began removing clergy from the building. I sang through my tears as I watched Elizabeth Gleich, Associate Pastor of the United Church of Christ in Middlebury, pregnant with twins, be escorted in handcuffs into a police van. She was putting her body in the way of a brutal deportation machine, slowing it down for part of a day and enacting her Christian faith in showing pure hearted love for our immigrant neighbors.
I invite you, my dear neighbors, to come be part of this work to honor the humanity of everyone, whatever their immigration status. People will be traveling to Williston from around New England to say NO to ICE’s brutality during the week of October 4 through 9. Learn more at shutdownicevt.org. There will be art building, creative protest, songs of solidarity and we will weave a web of love and protection for our neighbors. If you can’t make it in person, you can support by donating money — the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s wouldn’t have made the progress it did without people writing checks!
I hope to see you on the streets.
Joanna Colwell is the founder of Otter Creek Yoga and the Yoga Equity Project, in Middlebury’s Marble Works district. She is a proud member of Jewish Voice for Peace and the L’Chaim Collective. Joanna lives in Ripton.
