The Power of Witness

In this video, Peter Gabriel talks about how people can be tortured, raped, and hacked to death, yet have their stories denied, buried and forgotten -

unless they are captured on video.

His program, Witness works to put cameras - and now mobile phones - into the hands of human rights workers around the world so that people can see the truth of what's happening to real people - real men, women and children - across the Globe.

Yet, these terrible injustices are not just occurring in Third World countries.

Life-wrecking abuse and injustice is alive and well in the U.S., in our fields and slaughterhouses.

For instance, in Florida, migrant workers are locked up, cheated out of pay, robbed of their names, stacked 10 to a room. It's modern day slavery in which immigrants have become a 20th century slave class, used and thrown away and scapegoated by business and politicians alike while being labeled as "aliens," "illegals" and "criminals."

Will we continue to turn away from their suffering? Will we be like the apostle who denied Christ? Remember what Christ said: that how we treat the least of our brothers is how we treat Him.

See this video in which Gabriel hopes that, through awareness, we can respond with compassion and reach for the Light.

As Horace Mann wrote:

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

What can you do?

1) Contribute what you can to Witness.

2) Don't be afraid to speak up against those who advocate for oppression and apathy.

3) Affirm this world is being transformed through awareness and empathy, compassion and activism, and through bringing the Light of God's Love here, on earth, to right the wrongs.

The problems of the world have a human face. Make it your business to look into it.

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Destitute, afflicted, tormented. Hebrews 11:37

To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is a sin. James 4:17

I mean not that other men be eased, and ye burdened: But by an equality, that now at this time your abundance may be a supply for their want, that their abundance also may be a supply for your want: that there may be equality. 2 Corinthians 8:13, 14

Targeting Immigration: Immoral Politics

The article, Impounded Fathers gives us stories of human suffering, stories like that of the immigrant father from Honduras who was imprisoned, then deported from the U.S. after a routine traffic stop in Miami.

Forced to leave his wife behind - who was also detained by immigration officials - he also was forced to leave his 5- and 7-year-old sons behind, who were placed in foster care.

Not understanding what had happened, the boys, when they were taken to visit their mother in jail, asked why their father had abandoned them. Realizing that the only way to reunite his family was to allow his children to be expatriated to Honduras, the father resigned himself to this, only to get caught up in a custody fight with American immigration officials who have threatened to keep the boys permanently in foster care on the premise that their parents abandoned them.

And thus are hard working people - who have slaved in this country as farmhands in our fields and butchers in our slaughterhouses, low paid assemblers in our factories and lower paid janitors - dehumanized and abused.

Ah, but this kind of heartless goose-stepping is only getting rid of about 18,000 people a year. We have 12 million immigrants to dispose of. If we aren't going to grant them amnesty and citizenship, then what do those who hate these people (and they are people with hearts and souls and hopes and dreams) propose to do about it once we lock them in?

As Lawrence Downes writes in 'Silent Amnesty': Where The Hard Right Goes Soft On Immigration :

Once we lock down the southern border, we lock ourselves in with 12 million illegal immigrants. Let’s assume we don’t want to deport them all, with a forced-resettlement program big enough to empty the state of Ohio. If we don’t want another Trail of Tears and don’t want anybody legalized, we will have to get rid of these people some other way.

This is where the rigor of the right turns to mush. Mr. Romney talks as tough as anyone about securing the borders and despising amnesty. He is proud of the way he tried to heap layers of misery on illegal immigrants when he was governor of Massachusetts. He calls the legalization provisions of the Senate bill utterly unacceptable. But he has laid out no alternative.

Why not? Why have Mr. Romney and all the hard, hardhearted radical "right" politicans - who are so, terribly, awfully wrong - not proposed some final way to "get rid" of our "illegals?"

1) Because their policies, taken to their extreme, are inhuman. There is no solution, not unless we wish to be the next Nazi Germany, building concentration camps and ovens for an American-style "Final Solution."

2) Despite whether the vehement hate expressed by politicians against immigrants is real or affected, it's a paper tiger: a political wedge used to manipulate votes. Although these politicians may pander to Neo-Nazis who might jump on a "Final Solution" bandwagon, their real goal is the maintainance of a confused immigration policy that creates a scapegoat, that forces immigrants to skulk around underground in order that they (the hard right politicians) have someone to kick around before elections.

3) Our economy, since our inception, has been built on the backs of slaves. While slavery is no longer legal, our immigration laws have been designed - purposefully - to bring us the next best thing: a powerless, voteless, cowed class of low paid workers unable to unionize, for fear of deportation. The system we have didn't happen by accident. It's desired by those who make higher profits because of it.

4) If we undertook mass deportations, our entire country would become a nation of spies dedicated to emptying itself of the very people who keep it going. At the very least, with our fields and slaughterhouses empty of workers, the nation would starve.

To treat people like objects, to hate and despise people while exploiting them should not be an American value.

I pray God no one thinks it is a Christian value.