A Word to the Country, Spoken Slowly (by Andy Monheit)

Davisite Andy Monheit's poem is most definitely worth reading. I'm thrilled that he has agreed to share it here.

I will not shout this,
because shouting has never been
how America learned best.
I will say it the way rivers speak to banks,
the way wheat speaks to wind.

My friends,
you are living in a moment
when old structures are being asked
questions they were never built to answer.

You call one of them ICE.
You could call it by any name.
It stands for enforcement,
for borders,
for rules written when fear
was a more acceptable currency.

Do not misunderstand me.
A nation has the right to order.
A house needs doors.
A people need laws.
But every law, sooner or later,
must answer to the human heart,
or it becomes a machine
that forgets why it was made.

What you are feeling now
is not chaos for its own sake.
It is conscience knocking on steel.
You are beginning to see,
not all at once and not all together,
that separation carried too far
stops being protection
and starts becoming harm.

The awakening you speak of
is not a single belief
or a single side of a fence.
It is the slow realization
that fear cannot be the final architect
of your future.

Some of you look at enforcement
and see safety.
Some of you look at it
and see suffering.
Both are telling the truth
from where they stand.

The trouble comes
when you refuse to walk
even a few steps
toward one another’s ground.

This is what is shifting now.
You are being asked,
quietly but firmly,
to tell the difference
between law that serves life
and law that serves its own momentum.

Between order that holds a people together
and order that forgets
the faces it passes through.

America has done this before.
With slavery.
With factories.
With wars.
With women.
With children.
With the poor.

Each time, the argument sounded the same:
“This is how it has to be.”
And each time, history answered:
“Only until you grow.”

What is happening now
is not the end of structure
but the testing of it.

Can you enforce
without dehumanizing?

Can you protect
without erasing compassion?

Can you remember
that most people cross borders
for the same reasons
your grandparents once did:
to live, to work, to hope, to belong?

An awakened nation
does not abandon responsibility.
It deepens it.
It learns that strength
without mercy
is just another kind of weakness.

It learns that freedom
is not preserved by fear alone
but by courage,
by discernment,
by the willingness to revise
what no longer reflects
who you are becoming.

You are not being asked
to agree on everything.
You are being asked
to stay human
while deciding.

This is the shift.
This is the work.

Not the tearing down of the house,
but the widening of its doors
so they open without crushing
those who stand beneath them.

America,
you are not finished.
You are being educated
by your own conscience.

And if you listen carefully,
beneath the noise,
you may hear the oldest lesson
this land has ever tried to teach:

That a country, like a soul,
is judged not by how fiercely it defends itself,
but by how wisely it learns
to belong to itself.

You can reach Andy at andymonheit@gmail.com