With Silent Lips She Cries

by Marsha Joyner

With silent lips she cries. "Give me your tired, your poor,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

This is etched in stone on the Statue of Liberty—as Lady Liberty looks out to the Atlantic Ocean, her back turned to the rest of us.

The huddled masses: the poor of all sizes, shapes and colors,

The people whose skin color is red, yellow, brown or black, whose eyes are slanted, whose religious Sabbath is celebrated on Friday or Saturday, the disabled,

Those whose sexual preferences are not "normal"(?), are we the wretched refuse,

The brown skinned people who struggle across a hostile border to realize an unkept promise— yearning to breathe free—

Mahatma Gandhi said, "passive violence fuels the fire of physical violence; and if we want to put out the fire of physical violence, logically we have to cut off the fuel supply." What is passive violence? According to Gandhi and his grandson Arun, passive violence is what we do to criticize and disrespect other people’s lives, their heritage, their history and their values. I will have to add ignoring or acting as if the huddled masses do not exist.

As the TV cameras give us a look into the faces of displaced people, children without parents, old folks without homes, the sick and dying left behind. We must ask the question, are they the wretched refuse? Are they tomorrow’s terrorists?

What happens to them two weeks from now when the cameras stop rolling, when the public moves on to the next headline? Is that what the huddled masses will look like?

For those of us who have glanced at the other side, can we say, “send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me”?

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of people in that society, who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose. People, who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.”

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop it now. I don’t have the answer, but I do know that collectively we can.