Category Archives: Uncategorized

Told to keep quiet, they wrote a letter

They couldn’t vote, and they had been told to keep quiet in church.

The year was 1837 and they were women of Stoneham. Passionate about their cause, however, they found a way to make their voices heard. Led by the widow, Sarah Gerry, they wrote a letter.

There were 14 of them—married, single, mothers, grandmothers, wives of prominent men and workers in shoe factories. When they signed their names, addressed to the elders of the Congregational Church, they used their own first names, not their husbands, bucking the current custom. Sarah Buck, Mary Bryant, Abigail Green, Sally Richardson, Nabby Richardson, Mary Newhall and others.

Friends Freedman Association teachers in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1863.

What they were so upset about was slavery, practiced in the South and supported by many in the North. What particularly galled them was the fact that so many Christians supported it.

We are “deeply aggrieved,” they wrote, “that such an utter abomination in the sight of Heaven . . . is now sustained and defended by almost the entire Christian church in the South, with whom we are in fellowship.”

They continued. “By refusing to rebuke and remonstrate,” they wrote, “we do in fact participate in their guilt.”

Silence is complicity, the women were saying, and if we do not speak, we, too, are guilty.

The women closed with an appeal to church leaders: “We entreat you to take such action … that will show plainly that our influence is on the side of justice and humanity.”

For the church and the town, the letter was the start of something. Although it took years of conflict and violence, the abolitionist movement took root and bore fruit in Stoneham.

In 1838 twenty-seven women, again led by Sarah Gerry, formed the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Stoneham. The men formed a chapter a year later.

In 1840, church members passed a resolution calling on their pastor “to bear faithful pulpit testimony against the sin of slavery.”

Then in 1850, after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, the new minister, the Rev. William Whitcomb,  gave a fiery sermon calling on parishioners to ignore the federal law mandating the capture and return of fugitive slaves. Instead, Whitman urged, “Hide the outcast or help him on his journey to a safer place, even though you may risk personal security, property and life.”

Recalling the brave men and women of Stoneham is fitting as we celebrate the Tricentennial of our town. It reminds us that those who came before us were faced with daunting challenges to what they believe and how they should act.

As in the decades before the Civil War, Christians today are also divided. Some believe that our President was saved by God to “make America great again.” Others cringe at the threats and actions harming vulnerable people among us. Like Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde in her sermon last week at the National Cathedral, they call for mercy and tolerance and justice—for immigrants, for LGBTQ+, for all those on the margins of our society.

Now it’s our turn. How and where will we make our stand?

‘Thee and Thou’ and the language of love

Romeo and Juliet used it. So did Ruth, David and Jesus, according to the early Bible translators. So, in the centuries that followed, poets, lovers and preachers have slipped back into this archaic dialect. Even Langston Hughes, who loved the American vernacular, chose it when he wrote to his “Black Beloved.”

I’m talking about the use of “thee and thou.” Although almost no one uses this dialect any more—that is, except some Quakers, and I’ll get to that later. We teach it to our children every time we have them say, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.”

To get a handle on this dialect, let me tell you why we English speakers find it quaint. First of all, it’s because modern English, unlike many other languages, has left us with only one word for “you.” That’s right. English, with its massive vocabulary, is so poor that it now only has one word.

It wasn’t always like that. In the Middle Age and Renaissance, English had more than one word for the second-person pronoun. There were three subject pronouns—the familiar “thou,” the formal “you,” and the plural “ye.”

First, let’s distinguish between singular and plural. In William Tyndale’s 1526 translation of the New Testament, we read: Ye are the salt of the erthe, and ye are the light of the worlde. Here, Jesus uses the plural ye when he is talking to more than one person.

On the other hand, when he is talking with one person, as to the woman at the well, he says, from the King James Bible: If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.

Nice thing, that ability in language to know if the speaker is addressing just one, or many people, by the pronoun he or she uses. Unfortunately, today’s Standard English leaves us stranded. We make up for it, however, with our own vernacular for the plural you. “You guys, y’all, youse,” etc. Not “proper” English, but it gets the job done.

But there’s something else going on in Jesus’ use of the “thou,” suggestive of his relationship with the woman.

In Shakespeare’s time, you had the option—as you still have in modern French, Spanish or German—of using “thou” or “you.” Common practice was to use “you” with your superiors, strangers, or in formal situations. But to your peers, your close friends, or with those below your social level, servants included, you would use the familiar “thou.”

In Romeo and Juliet, we first see this distinction in a conversation between Juliet’s nurse and Lady Capulet. Reminiscing on Juliet’s childhood, the nurse addresses Lady Capulet as “you,” showing respect, while Juliet’s mother responds using the familiar “thou.”

“You” was polite and formal. “Thou” was familiar. It was personal. But—and this is important—it was also the language of intimacy, the language of lovers.

Both Romeo and Juliet, when they first meet, without even knowing each other’s names, use the “you” form of address. At their next encounter, however, now love-struck, they slip into the language of intimacy: “O, speak again, bright angel! for thou art as glorious to this night, being o’er my head as is a winged messenger of heaven.”

And Juliet: “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” Why, my love, she is asking, must you have the name of my family’s enemy?

Whether the speaker uses “you” or “thou” is an indicator of their relationship, and this carries through in Shakespeare’s sonnets as well. To his beloved, as he is now an old man, Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 73:

“This perceiv’st thou, which makes thy love more strong/ To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.”

It’s still that way in other languages today. When addressing someone in Spanish, you use tu or Usted. In French, tu or Vous. In German, du or Sie. Using the wrong word, however, can get you into trouble. Which it did when I was a teenager in Germany, when I addressed Frau Liebig, the mother of my friend, with the familiar du rather than Sie.

“Do you address your elders like that in America?” she asked. When I explained that in America we spoke to everyone in the same way, she smiled. “But you shouldn’t here,” she said.

I learned that I could use du with my friends and my immediate family. But with other adults, teachers, employers, seniors, strangers—be sure to use the Sie form, she explained, along with its appropriate verb conjugations and the correct objective and possessive pronouns. In all, I would learn, there are seven words in German for “you.”

At the same time, however, when I attended the local Lutheran church, I heard the pastor pray using the familiar form of speech with God. Wow, I thought. I could use du with God! And so I learned: Vater unser, du der bist in Himmel, dein Name werde geheiligt….

So it once was in English. What we think of as church talk, or high talk, was the opposite. Thee and thou was the language of low talk, used with those we were “down with,” with those we love, and, remarkably, with our Father in heaven.

That’s why Quakers, those radical reformers from England, chose to use “thee and thou” even when everyone else had stopped using it. And, in so doing, they were making a statement about the equality of all people.

So here’s to the “Thee and Thou” of the Lord’s Prayer, and to all the funny verbs and pronouns that go along with them, Here’s to our freedom to talk to God as if we are speaking with our closest friend—whether we use archaic or modern English, formal grammar or street dialect. It’s all there in the words we choose.

Art: detail of 1884 painting of Romeo and Juliet by Frank Bernard Dicksee

How will we respond?

It was a gray day in Moscow, and a 7-year-old girl was on the way to the train station. Her mother had gone to the hospital to deliver, and the girl was being sent to her aunt.  In the streets, she remembers, were soldiers with rifles, and everywhere people in shock, some openly weeping.

Why are they crying,” she asked her father. It was March 5, 1953.

“Stalin has died,” her father said.

A friend and colleague told me this story. She also said that in a little bag her father took with him to work each day he packed a toothbrush, razor and extra underwear, in case he didn’t return.

I could relate. Also having Russian heritage, I knew of the Soviet dictator’s reign of terror. My relatives, German-Russian farmers on the Kuban steppe in Southern Russia, were exiled to Siberia and Kazakhstan. One died in a gulag. Another was shot. My Tanta Anna as a teenager was forced to work in a logging camp.

Meanwhile, my friend grew up under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. In a famous speech, Khrushchev had shocked the party by condemning Stalin’s crimes, coining the phrase, “cult of personality.”

In the following years, she excelled at the university, earning a doctorate. and began a career teaching math. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, she, her husband and their parents left Moscow and settled in New England. We taught together in Massachusetts.

As I had tea with her one day between classes, we talked about Stalin and the power he had over people. I recalled a passage in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago describing a Communist party meeting in the 1940s, where, after Stalin had spoken, the audience jumped to its feet to applause. The applause continued. It didn’t stop. Looking around, members were afraid to stop clapping. Would someone notice? Would they be on the slow train to Siberia?

Similar scenes occurred in Nazi Germany. In a 1936 photograph of a rally held at a shipyard, one German worker stands in a crowd with his arms folded. He is the only one not giving the Nazi salute. Once a loyal member of the Party, August Landmesser had fallen in love with a Jewish woman. After his engagement was discovered, he was expelled from the Party, and his marriage application denied. They had a daughter.

In 1937 Landmesser attempted to flee Germany with his family, but was arrested at the border. The Gestapo also arrested his wife, who delivered their second child in prison. Sent to the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre, she was murdered along with 14,000 others.

After three years in a concentration camp, Landmesser was forced into the German Army. He went missing in Croatia.

Many are the lessons we can draw from history. One we cannot ignore, however, is that authoritarian, autocratic governments cause great harm, not only to democratic institutions, but to vulnerable people.

Deportation of Jews from Muenster, Germany, Dec. 13, 1941.

As we begin life under a second Trump administration, millions of our neighbors are threatened with deportation. These include hundreds of thousands of DACA students and millions under temporary protected status (TPS) or awaiting action on their requests for asylum.

In the coming days, how shall we respond. Will we clap? Will we fold our arms? Will we speak what we believe? Will we act to safeguard the lives and liberties of others?

Who would you honor?

January 4, 2025

Today President Joseph Biden honored 19 Americans with the highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom. The recipients ranged from human rights workers to basketball stars, philanthropists to actors.

Although critics will snipe that some of the names were political choices, who among us did not cheer when our nation’s highest civilian award went to the José Andrés, World Kitchen chef, or Jane Goodall, animal biologist, or Michael J. Fox, actor and voice for Parkinson’s research.

Who didn’t chuckle when a towering Earvin “Magic” Johnson stooped down so the president could fasten the pendant around his neck? Or cheer when Bono, the U2 rock star who has fought for debt relief for poor nations, got the award.

The ceremony got me to thinking about the word “freedom” itself. What is freedom? Are there more than one? What freedoms are we talking about?

In a State of the Union address given 84 years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.”

He continued: “The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way.”

He defined the third as “freedom from want” and called for “economic understandings that will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants.”

The fourth freedom, Roosevelt stated, was “freedom from fear.” He called for a reduction in global armaments to the degree that that “no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.”

Articulated eleven months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Four Freedoms theme was incorporated into the Atlantic Charter and later became part of the Charter of the United Nations.

Although the three-term president was now defining freedom in global terms, his administration had from the start applied them to domestic policy and public programs.

In 1943 in four Saturday Evening Post covers painted by Normal Rockwell, the Four Freedoms showed us what freedom looks like at home, at the table, in moments of worship, and at a town meeting. You can see the original paintings today at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge.

Thinking about the recent Medal of Freedom ceremony, I realized that each person honored had in some way contributed to expanding one of the Four Freedoms.

And that got me to wondering, if I were to pick individuals in Stoneham who exemplified these freedoms, who would they be?

What my choices would have in common is the desire to realize freedom not only in their own lives, but in the lives of others as well. I would look for people who lift others up. A teacher who teaches compassion as well as calculus. A banker who helps small businesses gain a foothold. A town moderator who keeps democracy on track. An artist who teaches seniors to paint. A tutor who helps immigrants learn English. A food bank or community dinner director. A legislator, coach, librarian, nurse, police or fire fighter, pastor, and more.

Who would you choose? Look around you. In the New Year, we will be challenged to honor and uphold the freedoms we cherish. It’s something each of us, in our own way, can do.

I want to wake up

I want to wake up in a world

where nobody puts flags on their lawns

where breakfast is communal

where children play hopscotch in Congress

I want to wake up where the rich

are not afraid of the poor

and the poor are not ashamed

and everyone has dirt between their toes

I want to wake up where doctors

hold office hours on the street

where libraries fireproof their books

and mothers make the laws

I want to go to school

where weaving is on the curriculum

astronomy is taught by poets

and philosophy taught by day laborers

I want to wake up where

only comedians have straight faces

and the laughter of children

is our national anthem

I want to wake up in a world where

no one has wine until everyone has water

where mosquitos forget how to mate

and Haiti is again the Garden of Eden

I want to wake up where no

one crossing a river gets caught in barbed wire

cowers under drones or

suffocates under broken concrete

I want to wake up in a world

where bullets are composted

the disabled fly in first class

and there is always room at the inn

I want to wake up in a world where

mercy is more than a speech by Portia

where judges are quick to forgive

and lethal injections are obscene

I want to wake up where farm workers

can eat in fine restaurants

and those who frame houses

can live in them

I want to wake up where

three sisters dance in the garden

blue potatoes sleep in the soil

and tomatoes ripen before our eyes

I want to wake up in a world

where the young explore the universe

but come home after six days

to light the Sabbath candle

I want to wake up in a world

so distant from our own

so close to our own

Close your eyes

Open them

Step through

Art: El Sueño. lithograph

by Diego Rivera, 1932

A Happy Convergence

Autumn has passed now, and the trees are barren. Fall colors have given way to a winter spectrum of blacks and whites, grays and browns. It’s the season when the sky grows bigger, the horizon lower, when what was once hidden by foliage comes into sight.

Over at Stone Zoo, it’s easier to catch a glimpse of the Mexican gray wolves as they slip between the trees on the hillside. And the snow leopards on their ledges. I also look for the arctic foxes, now in their white coats for the season.

And if you walk up Cowdrey Street onto Farm Hill, as I sometimes do, you can look out over Stoneham to Winchester and Woburn. If you climb the tower on Bear Hill in the Fells, you can see Boston and the shimmering sea beyond.

Stoneham’s hills are a good place to see sunsets, the evening planets, and the new moon.

Living for many years in the Southwest, where clouds are rare, I grew accustomed to the presence of the moon. Like the agrarians of old, I slipped into a lunar calendar, feeling hopeful at the slivered new moon, happy in its fullness, and wistful with its waning.

Even though the Western world moves mostly in solar time, the lunar calendar is embedded in our observance of special days. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the full moon following the vernal equinox. Passover, the 15th day of the month of Nisan, begins at the full moon. I think of the Hebrews fleeing Egypt. Nice to have light in the night sky.

Hanukkah, with its hopeful lights, carries us through the last quarter of the moon, when the sky is darkest.

Although the Jewish calendar follows the lunar cycle, every three years an extra month is added, keeping it close to the solar year.

Many Asian cultures observe a lunar calendar. China’s traditional calendar is lunisolar, that is, combining lunar and solar cycles. New Year occurs between January 20 and February 20.

This year we have a happy convergence of lunar and solar time, coinciding with our winter holidays. We started December with a new moon, which becomes full this weekend, December 14-15. Then it begins waning, so that by Christmas we will see but a thin crescent, early in the morning. After this, the moon will go dark as we pass through long nights before it returns with the New Year.

This dark period also coincides with the winter solstice, a solar time marker, and with Hanukkah, a lunar holiday, which, like Passover, is a “movable feast.” Hanukkah, also called the Festival of Lights, begins on December 25, and extends through the moon’s dark phase. On each of the eight days of Hanukkah, a candle in the menorah is lit, marking the miraculous lighting of the temple lamp, even though there was no more lamp oil. The holiday concludes, just as the new moon reappears in the sky.

In the Genesis creation story the heavenly lights were established “to divide the day from the night [and] for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.”

And so it is today. Winter is a good time to look around. The leaves are down, the nights are long, and the stars are bright.

May the lights shine for you, this holiday season.

First photo by Rob Pettingill, http://astronomy.robpettengill.org/

Second and third photo by Jeanne Craigie, Stoneham’s Eye on the Sky

Being thankful for our immigrant neighbors

Last week Becky and I attended the Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards celebration in Cambridge. It is held each year by the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden to honor immigrants for their outstanding achievements in business and community enrichment.

The first honoree this year is Erdem Kaya from Turkey, who started a community-oriented jewelry business in Newburyport. The second is Krenar Komoni from Kosovo. Komoni founded a company that designed a new system for tracking shipping around the world. His innovations produce savings for everyone on the supply chain.

The third honoree is Mariana Matus from Mexico. Based on her research at MIT, she founded and became CEO of BioBot Analytics in Cambridge, which uses wastewater analysis to improve public health. During the COVID-19 epidemic, her company was the first in the world to provide data on COVID-19 levels, based on wastewater monitoring. This information saved countless lives.

Matus’ company continues to monitor for other public health threats, including influenza, RSV, monkey pox and high-risk substances such as opioids.

Listening to awardees’ inspiring stories, we couldn’t help but think of the thousands of immigrants in Massachusetts and how they benefit and enrich our towns and communities. Like the three above, they bring not only economic benefits, but engagement in civic life, mentoring and culture that enriches all our lives.

At the ceremony, we also learned a few “fun facts” about immigrants. For example, that 31 percent of all new businesses in America are started by immigrants. Immigrants also have a higher workforce participation rate than U.S.-born residents, as well as a higher self-employment rate. And, despite what you have heard, immigrants have a lower crime rate than other Americans.

Attending the Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards program, we are left with the realization that immigrants have always made our country better. And that the current hype that immigrants are to blame for our woes, is not only wrong but terribly short-sighted. We need immigrants, not only like Kaya, Komoni and Matus, but the people who grow and pick our food, who feed us in their restaurants, who care for us in hospitals and nursing homes, who build our houses, and bring their stories and art to remind us of our own humanity.

Looking at the big picture, we see a continued need for newcomers to replenish and support us. Recent dips in fertility rates have pushed us below the population-replacement level. A 2024 study by the University of Pennsylvania projects that as we grow older, the U.S. population growth will decline. Also, the worker-to-retiree ratio is expected to drop from 3-1 to 2-1 by 2075. Both factors signal dire outcomes. Preventing these outcomes “will require faster immigration by several multiples of its current rate.”

The simple truth is that we need immigrants, including asylum seekers and refugees, to keep building our societies. We need workers, but we also need imagination and ideas. We need problem solvers, like the honorees named above.

As the descendant of immigrants, I would like to say to my immigrant friends and neighbors, Thank you.

Note: The awards program was sponsored by the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden. It honors Barry Portnoy, the entrepreneur and philanthropist, late husband of the school’s founder, Diane Portnoy.

A family reunion and the shadow of history

This summer when our cousins, the Haegelens, arrived from Germany, east and west came together. Irina grew up in a village in Siberia, Manfred in Ufa on the slopes of the Ural Mountains. When they were 15, as the Soviet Union was crumbling, their families emigrated to Germany.

When their jet touched down at Logan, they brought their two children, Friedrich and Johanna. They also brought stories, not only about their busy lives near Dusseldorf, but about family history.

Their branch of the family connects to the same tree as my paternal ancestors. We share great grandparents, Mennonite farmers who settled in Southern Russia, along with other ethnic Germans invited to Russia in the 18th century by Catherine II.

In 1914, at the start of the Great War, my grandfather was arrested and exiled to Siberia. The next year, however, he escaped to China, then boarded a ship to San Francisco. The rest of the family remained in Russia.

Now, in our backyard, children and grandchildren were playing together. We made day trips to Walden Pond and Rockport, hiked in the Fells and visited Stone Zoo. In the evening we played dominoes and bingo, calling out numbers in two languages.

Arriving in Germany as teenagers, Manfred and Irina found opportunities unavailable in Russia. Excelling in their studies, they both earned doctorates, Manfred in engineering, Irina in pharmacology.

In the evening we shared old photos and stories. Irina remembered carrying milk in cans from their small farm to the depot. She also remembers her grandfather, who taught math in the village school. He saw her potential and encouraged her.

We also talk of our beloved Tanta Anna, who with two of her five children left their kolkhoz, a collective farm in Southern Russia, to find a new life in Cologne. I have a photo of her on a motorcycle.

When she was 17, during World War II, she was forced to work in the forests, cutting and hauling trees. It happened like this. After Hitler’s tanks crossed into Russia, Stalin, fearing that the nation’s ethnic minorities would rise up against him, ordered their removal and banishment. It was the Great Deportation of 1941.

On September 1, 1941, some 440,000 ethnic Germans living along the Volga were told to report for deportation. Treated as prisoners, they were herded into freight cars for the long trek east. The journey—the trains stopping only every three or four days for food and water—took weeks, sometimes months. On the way four of ten deportees died, their bodies left inside the cars or thrown out beside the tracks.

The mass deportations were also accompanied by summary executions. Manfred’s grandfather, who taught German in the village school, was taken out and shot.

Siberia was not the only destination. Thousands were deported to Kazakhstan and other eastern republics. Cousin Lena, who also emigrated to Germany, told me her grandmother’s account.

“When the soldiers came, they took everything. If a woman had two skirts on, she had to take one off and give it to them.”

They traveled in horse-drawn carts across Kazakhstan almost to the Chinese border. If someone died, they had to leave them lying there. There was no time for burial.

At their destination, there were no houses, so to survive the oncoming winter, they dug shelters in the earth. The next year they built crude houses. They could travel no more than three kilometers in any direction.

Russia’s Germans were not the only ones deported. In all, there were at least 1.5 million, including the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens and others.

As we sat on the couch sharing family photos, or watched the kids swinging in the hammock, I realized how lucky we are. How lucky the Haegelens are to have found good lives in Germany, and how lucky we are in America. Yet somewhere in my consciousness, as it is in theirs, is the shadow of history. A history of deportation, compulsion and violence. I pray it is something our children will never know.

A Song for our Time, too

Woodie Guthrie wrote the lyrics. Martin Hoffman set them to music. Since then, It’s been sung by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen and a dozen others, including Arlo Guthrie.
The ballad tells of an airplane crash in California’s Los Gatos Canyon. On board were 28 migrant farm workers from Mexico.

The year was 1948, six years after the start of Operation Bracero, a government program which recruited Mexican laborers to work in American fields. Now the braceros were being rounded up and flown back to Mexico. At the same time, to keep prices high, the government was paying growers to leave their crops in the field. Peaches were rotting and oranges piling up in dumps.

The song is called “Deportee.” Guthrie wrote it after news reports listed the names of the pilots, attendant and immigration guard, but referred to the farm workers only as “deportees.” Unlike the four Americans, the braceros were buried in a mass grave without names, marked
“Mexican Nationals.” As the song goes,

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees”
 
The roundup of the Los Gatos laborers was just one episode in several government campaigns to remove Mexicans from American soil. Mass deportations began during the Great Depression and continued through the 1940s. Then in 1954, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) brought out “Operation Wetback.” Under this federal program, officials used military-like tactics to arrest tens of thousands of immigrants across the country. Caught up in the raids were farm and factory workers, including some American citizens.

In July of 1955, several thousand deportees were found wandering the streets of Mexicali, a desert town bordering California. Yanked from their jobs and families, they had simply been dumped across the border. According to one account, 88 died of heat exposure in the 112
degree heat.

In Texas, thousands of deportees were crammed onto boats bound for Mexican ports in conditions comparable with those on slave ships. Others were packed into trucks. By the end of Operation Wetback, the INS claimed it had “repatriated” 1.3 million Mexicans.

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees”
 
Accompanying the mass deportations were media depictions of Mexicans as dirty, disease- bearing and irresponsible. News coverage focused on border and immigration officials planning and conducting raids. Only in time did most Americans come to see this as something shameful. In 2012 the state of California formally apologized for its role in deporting hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens.

On Labor Day in 2013, United Farm Worker President Arturo Rodriguez joined hundreds gathered at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, California, to memorialize the 28 farm workers, 25 men and three women, killed in Los Gatos Canyon. This time, inscribed in the headstone, was each person’s name.

Next week American voters will choose a new president. One of the candidates has promised to resurrect Operation Wetback, only under his plan the government, in a military-style operation, will deport 11 million undocumented immigrants (Trump put the figure at 18 million).

Trump would also end deferrals for children (DACA) and temporary protected status (TPS) for migrants fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries. Such a massive deportation would throw our country into financial, legal and social chaos. As Slate authors Louis Hyman and Natasha Iskander have written, “To return to the era of Operation Wetback would be to return to an America ruled not by law but by terror.”

Perhaps worst of all, it would perpetuate the big lie that immigrants, asylum seekers, migrants and refugees are not like us, that they are less than human. That they don’t deserve names.

Once that lie is believed, we become silent to the cruel treatment of others.

Photo: Lance Canales & the Flood