On November 6, 2024, the day after…
I had the great honor of joining colleagues from El Paso’s Hope Border Institute and members of the New Jersey Immigrant Rights team of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) at the beautiful New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, to introduce the premiere of the latest film by Robert Bilheimer and Worldwide Documentaries: Running to Stand Still - Migrants Search for Hope in the Promised Land. Graciously hosted by the New Brunswick Development Corporation (DEVCO) in partnership with AFSC, Good Faith, and Retreat to Broadway, we knew in advance that convening an event on the day after the most consequential election in US history would be risky. But as the evening’s facilitator, Erin Dolan, stated in her opening remarks, we did not expect the razor’s edge race to yet be called.
We were wrong. Indeed, by the time I checked into my New Brunswick hotel at 11 pm on November 5, it was clear the direction the election was going. My hotel receptionist, a self-styled “Afro-Latino New Jerseyan,” was alone and weeping. His family had all swung Red, he said. He was incredulous. His only explanation?
They’d been taken in by the lies fed to them, and the enemy manufactured for them, incessantly day after day after day on Fox News.
He had a live stream running surreptitiously on his phone. We watched together. We cried together. We witnessed American democracy descend into darkness together.
In those early moments — before pundits and democratic party operatives would pick apart all that went wrong — all my new friend and I saw were the walls of deceit that had been erected for months on Fox and other extreme-right media channels, as well as in the deep recesses of the internet, like in gaming spaces and on podcasts where few dare to venture. The fearmongering and enemy-making had made their mark — exacerbated by the failure of voices from both the Center and Left to push back.
The 2024 election put on high relief just how divided we have become.
We are now 20 years into the age of Global Apartheid. It snuck up on most of us, especially those of us who believed in the durability of the 20th-century promise of human rights for all. There are now more than 80 physical walls around the world — and counting — raising deeper, taller, angrier, and more violent barriers between us all the time.
But the walls that divide us are ideological, too. As more and more media sources get purloined and purified by Broligarchs all too willing to bend the knee to a man of questionable wealth and intellect, a bully on an illegitimate pulpit, the walls of deceit disrupt our ability to discuss and address the real issues we face today, as the nation — and the world — burn.
Like the Wizard of Oz states when Elphaba realizes he’s an emperor with no clothes, “Back where I come from,” which we all know is MAGA-party faithful Kris Kobach’s Kansas, “everybody knows that the best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy.”
Today’s enemy is people on the move: “the world’s most vulnerable people,” in the UN’s terms. And the most hardened walls of all are the walls that encircle the hearts of those who would seek to harm folks seeking safety in the so-called promised land.
In a subsequent post, I will discuss the role of walls historically: what purposes they’ve served and whether they’ve ever really worked. For now, I hope you like my speech from “The Day After” on the stage at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center.
Strap in, everyone. The next four years are going to be bumpy. And the only way through them is together.
Wishing you a Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day.
Keep your eyes on the prize,
XO Sarah
Sarah Towle is an educator, researcher, and human rights defender; a choral soprano, charismatic speaker, and author of the award-winning book: Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands. She has taught English language literacy, cross-cultural communication, and the writing craft for three decades on four continents across the age span and in myriad class contexts, including under the trees in refugee settings. Sarah resides in an ephemeral borderlands, buffeted and buoyed by a diversity of languages, cultures, landscapes, and creeds.
Her latest initiative, the Hope Knows No Borders Network, seeks to link up immigration rights advocates, attorneys, and organizations nationwide. DM Sarah if you’d like to take part.
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