No answers

In the headlines this week, the San Berndanino diocese has suspended the requirement for parishioners to attend weekly mass. Hispanic worshippers face danger in traveling to and from services. Cal State LA has allowed professors to move classes online and to change attendance policies because ICE may seize students on their way to and from class. Border agents on horseback and in Humvees staged a photo operation in LA’s MacArthur park, site of a children’s day camp. The footage of horses and masked agents spreading across the park terrifies,even if you know the camp was evacuated before they arrived. In an immigration raid at a Northern California farm, children were caught up in the tear gassing of protestors, and an adult worker has died of injuries sustained in the raid.

Here in white middle-class Kentucky, life looks the same as ever. Chris spends every evening tending the meadow behind our house. Our son went to camp this week. Our daughter’s cat got spayed. I’ve been at work, planning a conference scheduled for the end of July.

My husband wears a button from the Holocaust Museum in Washington. It says, “What you do matters.” A magnet with the same message hangs on our refrigerator.

I believe it with all my heart. And I don’t know what to do here in Kentucky while American terror unfolds.

On Tuesday night, locals gathered to learn what we will do to protect our neighbors when ICE’s new 150 billion dollar budget allows them to turn their gaze on even the smallest rural spaces with the fewest immigrants. I missed the meeting. I was at the ER with a college student who’d had a bicycle wreck.

American terror is not new. Chattel slavery. The Trail of Tears. The Chinese Exclusion Act. Jim Crow. The School of the Americas at Fort Benning.

My son asks why our time -- this time -- must be in a nation where immigrants cannot attend church or go to school safely.

I have no answer. I know that what we do matters. And here in Kentucky, on a blistering hot day, I don’t know what to do. It is not enough to keep our eyes open. I know that.