When Home Won’t Let You Stay ©

Reverend Janet Parsons

Gloucester UU Church

July 16, 2023

 

 

In 2015, the author Amitav Ghosh began to pay close attention to the “migration crisis” in Europe. For several years now we have all seen the images of overcrowded unseaworthy boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea, with reports of sinkings and of people just barely surviving long enough to wash ashore on a Greek or Italian island. Ghosh, a native of India, began to notice how many of the refugees appeared to be South Asian, and not from the war-torn parts of Africa or the Middle East. So Ghosh began investigating and discovered that many of the refugees were young Bengali men from Bangladesh.  This was a surprise, as Bangladesh was not at war, and its economy was quite strong. Ghosh commented, in his book The Nutmeg’s Curse, “That Bangladesh, and the Bengal Delta more generally, is exceptionally vulnerable to climate change is a well-known fact: much of the country lies less than one meter above sea level and it has already lost a good deal of land to the rising waters. In 2005 the partial sinking of a single island led to the displacement of more than half a million people.” (Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse, p. 155.)

 

Ghosh interviewed a young Bengali man who he called Khokon. The young man remembered growing up on his family’s farm in Bangladesh, and the good rice harvests. But as he grew older there were more and more inundations causing lengthy floods. These flooding spells were interspersed with droughts and more and more violent weather. Eventually, to survive, the family decided to sell land to raise the money to send Khokon to Europe. He was deported once, and the family decided to sell the remaining land, all they had, to try again. Khokon ended up in Libya, and it took years for him to earn enough money to pay traffickers to find him a place on a leaky boat to Sicily. Khokon survived, and thanks to the help of aid agencies, made his way to Parma, in Italy, where he has relatives, and now has a job in a warehouse.

 

What surprised Amitav Ghosh was that Khokon was unable to see his forced migration as a consequence of the climate crisis; that he would not call himself a climate migrant. It took time before Ghosh was able to understand that to the migrants, the climate disruptions were just one factor among many, including historical injustice caused by classism and racism.

 

There are many, many reasons why ‘home won’t let people stay’. (Warsan Shire, “Home”.) We are used to thinking of the reasons as sporadic, as likely short-term, and fixable. Perhaps there is a war, as we have witnessed during the past year and a half in Ukraine. There, we watched people who looked very much like ourselves board trains with their rolling suitcases. We could relate more than usual, probably because of their light skin color and their personal property. Perhaps there is a famine, as we’ve witnessed in Africa. We’re asked to send money to help buy food and drinking water. But we expect that the problem will resolve, that the rains will come, that the terrorists or guerillas fighting for territory and displacing people will eventually stop their conflict.

 

But if we look closely, as Amitav Ghosh did, we are forced to recognize that the violence being done to the land is a form of conflict, of war, and it is accelerating. We are seeing the results of economic processes, and decisions that never prioritize the needs of the poor, or of the land itself. And year after year, we make the decision to not act, or to delay action. Lack of action is a decision.

 

On June 14, last month, a ship overloaded with migrants sank off the coast of Greece, and over 600 lives were lost. This horrific tragedy received very little attention in the media. This was partly because four days later, on June 18, a submersible built by a billionaire containing five people imploded during an expedition to view the wreck of the Titanic. The media seized on the mystery of how this could have happened, and news stories abounded for days, completely eclipsing the story of the capsized migrant ship. Again, we make decisions on how to act, but we also make decisions about where to place our attention. We have the privilege to be able to choose.

 

What counts as ‘news’, of course, prioritizes that which is new. And sadly, the deaths of migrants trying to escape the mouth of a shark is nothing new. The poet Amanda Gorman, writing in this morning’s New York Times, noted that the United Nations estimates that over 27,000 people have been lost in the Mediterranean since 2014. (Amanda Gorman, “In Memory of Those Still in the Water,” New York Times, July 15, 2023.)

 

We have had the luxury of placing refugee crises into one of two categories. We have thought of them either as the result of war, as in Ukraine – certainly human action – or of unexplicable natural disasters, which are often referred to as ‘acts of God.’  I invite us to think about that phrase for a moment – we’ve all heard it so often that it’s likely to just roll past our ears without generating much of a reaction.

 

But think about what that phrase says: an ‘act of God’. It means that whatever natural disaster happened isn’t caused by humans. And so these must be isolated events, correct? And there is nothing we can do can control them, or stop them. We end up deciding that the problem isn’t ours to fix.

 

But we know now that these climate events are not isolated. This past week, the news website Vox published an article titled, “There’s no such thing as a disaster-resistant place anymore.” (www.vox.com,  July 13, 2023, by Rachel DuRose).  We watched this week as once again the state of Vermont was devastated by flooding. Vermont, which just a few years ago was considered one of the states most resistant to natural disasters. (Ibid.)

 

Too many of us are still clinging to the thought that the climate disruptions will be a Third World problem; that we here in an affluent corner of the Northern Hemisphere will be spared. We think we have the privilege of inaction, of watching. But as more and more people are displaced, where will they go?  It’s sobering to think that even a couple of years ago it was believed that people could move to Vermont to avoid the worsening natural disasters.  (Vox, ibid.)

 

And as the Vox article pointed out, as the frequency of these devasting weather events increases, who is going to be able to pay to restore cities and towns, to rebuild roads and schools?

 

The world is telling us that it’s time to stop using the phrase ‘act of God.’ What will our human response be? Not just to the science of climate, but to the needs of the millions of people facing migration and homelessness?

 

Today is a day for squarely facing the future. And this is a hard conversation to have, on a warm summer morning. It’s painful and uncomfortable to hear, to think about. Facing the future is what Genevieve has been doing, and what she is asking us to do.

 

Facing the future is overwhelming. But there are two truths for us to leave with here today: first, we must respond. The time for thinking that this is only happening to other people has ended. And second, we do not have to do anything alone. There are people and organizations already helping refugees and working to mitigate the climate crisis. There is strength in numbers: please add your strength to those already working, already facing the future.

 

I leave you today with the conclusion of Marge Piercy’s poem, The Low Road:

 

“…it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again and they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.

 

Vow to be one more today.

 

Blessed Be.

Amen.