They came from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. They were not thugs or lazy people intent on taking advantage of American generosity. They were family men who worked hard, sometimes in the middle of the night, to care for their mothers, fathers, siblings, wives, children. They came for jobs that would provide them with enough income to send money to people back home. Their motives for being in the United States were unselfish, focused on hard work and a willingness to do the kind of jobs that most people don’t want. They quietly toiled from day to day, mostly unnoticed, faceless individuals too often imagined to be invaders in the minds of some American citizens, sometimes generically described by even those holding the highest offices in the land as “boogeymen” who were not even people.
On a night when most of us were slumbering they were on the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore repairing potholes to make the journeys of those who used the bridge a bit smoother. It was just another long day of work for them. They may have been tired but they had learned to do whatever was needed to insure that they would be able to provide for those they loved. According to those who knew them they were good employees, good people who showed up when needed regardless of the time of day. They had little idea that the routine repair they were doing might be the last one that they ever did. They did not see the danger coming their way.
At about 1:38 AM on March 26, a container ship slammed into the bridge. Within seconds the entire structure failed and came apart. The men were thrown into the water below. Did they realize what was happening? Did they know how to swim? Were their last thoughts terrifying or did they think of their loved ones as they hurtled into the water? How could something like this have happened? It was supposed to be just another repair, just another night at work.
In some ways the six men who came to the United States in search of a way to make life better for themselves and their families represent the stories of all people who have come to our country in search of relief from the struggles in faraway lands. My own ancestors arrived here from parts of Great Britain long before colonists broke away from king and country in a revolution that would reverberate around the world. I know little about their lives other than their names. One of them was an indentured servant working her way to freedom. Others simply settled on land that they assumed to be free for the taking even as the native people asserted their own claims to the bounty of those original colonies.
Much later my mother’s parents would arrive on steamships bound for Galveston, Texas filled with the same hopeful dreams as those six men on the bridge in Boston. My grandparents were from an area of Austria-Hungary that would one day be known as Slovakia. They worked in fields cultivating and harvesting crops. They cleaned buildings in the wee hours of the night and found jobs in bakeries and meat packing plants. They saved their money and purchased a tiny plot of land on which they would slowly build a tiny home where they would raise eight children whom they taught to cherish the opportunities of the United States. They would endure prejudice and abuse with their heads held high and their determination to succeed protecting them from the slings and arrows of misunderstanding.
Those six men on that bridge in Baltimore were part of the ongoing history of our nation, so much like the first people who came across the ocean in hopes of finding better lives. The streams of humanity across our borders were never intended to be invasions, but simply ways to better life. Those who have come here have all been people, humans willing to work and sacrifice to find a tiny plot of land where they might be free to be themselves. They were mostly good people with good intentions and a willingness to work for their privilege of being here.
Perhaps if we were to begin by assuming the best about those now flooding across our borders rather than branding them with bad intentions we might find more humane ways of dealing with their desires to enjoy the kind of lives that we often take for granted simply because we were born here. The accident of birth came because our own ancestors once traveled here or were forced to be here or were native to this land. We exist in this place and this time as a consequence of people on branches of our family trees. Of course we want to protect our precious nation, but we would be well to appreciate the motives of those begging to join us, to understand their histories as well as our own. It does us no good to see people as faceless members of an invading horde. They are people with names and stories and reasons for risking everything to be with us. While we may find some bad actors among them, most of them will be more akin to those six men who were working hard to repair a bridge in the middle of the night.
The beauty of the United States lies in generosity and compassion, not in concertina wire or angry insults. Sometimes we have done bad things in the name of progress or in thinking we are protecting each other. We can learn from those moments and strive for fairness and understanding. We can find ways to accommodate those who want to be part of our freedom and opportunity without being cruel. We can name them and listen to them and see them as humans just like we are. Only then will we make the right kind of adjustments to the ever changing flux and flow of the world from which we ourselves have come. A good start for all us will be thinking of those six good people from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico who were on that bridge in the middle of the night.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 