March 22, 2017
Page 7
edition
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O PINION
Best Intentions and Solemn Commitments
Portland’s safety
pin campaign
r onault ls C atalani
I was bone-tired. I was
slouched at the exhausted
end of one of those nights
when your workday just
won’t quit. Not with so
much still undone.
I pulled on my boots, believing a walk
would help, but Oregon rain was falling
straight and hard from clouds not half as
high as downtown’s Wells Fargo tower.
Then, as if on cosmic cue, a Facebook no-
tification buzzed my sleepy iPhone. Kath-
leen D. Gunnell Saadat was posting on the
safety pin campaign.
Wearing a safety pin, if you haven’t
heard, lets anxious families who fled cruel
states, failed economies, or rising oceans,
know they’re safe near the pin’s wearer, a
symbol of solidarity. “Safe” from our su-
per-nationalist leaders and their suddenly
enabled followers.
Saadat, if you haven’t met, is living his-
tory. One of our River City anchor elders.
On this moody night she was using social
media to set out what her muscular gener-
ation expects from the next one. From us.
In her post, Saadat wrote about a couple
gathering her in their arms when an angry
by
man yelled all kinds of racial awfulness
at her. It happened before our current turn
toward societal instability, well before
Portland’s safety pin campaign. “No
one helped,” she said, “until I called
to a passing couple and asked for help.
They were white. They did not hesi-
tate.”
“People who choose to wear a safe-
ty pin” Saadat continued in the tone
characteristic of all elder aunties on
count seven decades of fumbled foreign
policy promises, our Constitution’s amne-
siac episodes, local civil society’s silence,
even gentle Jesus Christ’s urgings – living
in the broken hearts of Native and African
America – chilling the broken bones of
our Nikkei, Korean, Khmer, Lao, Hmong,
Iu Mien, Lao, Afghani, Iraqi, and Kurdi,
neighbors. These families asking for help
again, from Anglo America, is big.
Sharing a nation made of our best in-
Drawing a crowd to protect a Mexican or a
Muslim from an immigration officer or an ugly
bigot, is good. Good also is civil disobedience
in the tradition of don César E. Chavez and the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.
all continents and on every lovely island in
between “ – should understand the commit-
ment they make to get directly involved.
“I took my chances that whoever I asked
for help, would in fact help.” Long pause.
And inside her pause lies the solemn social
compact of our times. Inside this moment,
must reside both your promise to act and
her trust in your sincerity.
Saadat’s gamble that night was big. The
biggest. Indeed, ask any ethnic stream
elder from the community and they’ll re-
tentions, has never been enough. Portland
ideals will not do. This year we sorrow the
75th anniversary of Japanese America’s
forced removal from their homes. From
their homes. President Franklin D. Roos-
evelt’s Executive Order 9066 sent 120,000
elders, parents, and their children to barbed
wire compounds. Portlanders’ babies were
born under the guard of US Army riflemen.
Only those of us committed, as Saadat
said, “to get directly involved” can mend
these neighbors’ hearts and bones. Pro-
nouncing policy statements is not enough.
You and me gathering to cheer them, is
not enough. President Donald J. Trump’s
authoritarian ethos has already turned into
hard hits. On us. On Native, settled, and
new Americans, alike.
How each of us acts on the safety
pin’s promise, is a personal commitment.
Drawing a crowd to protect a Mexican or
a Muslim from an immigration officer or
an ugly bigot, is good. Good also is civil
disobedience in the tradition of don César
E. Chavez and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King. Mastering a simple jujitsu trip is
good. Those of us safe in our households
and work floors telling our elected officials
that declines in public services in exchange
for protecting vulnerable families, is nec-
essary. Bottom line: The pin requires some
pain. Commitment is like that. But there’s
a big prize. The biggest. At the end of Saa-
dat’s posted essay, she says the five sweet-
est words you’ll ever hear during your short
stay on our shared little blue planet. – “I
will never forget them,” she said. Meaning
that kind couple who embraced her fears.
Meaning those lovely Portlanders ready to
close the awful distance between best in-
tentions, inspiring words, then sudden, si-
lent withdrawal from all that. Seventy-five
years of this.
Ronault LS Catalani (Polo) is a long-
time activist and community lawyer.
Powerful Truths in Top Film ‘Moonlight’
A story to open
hearts and minds
M arian W right e delMan
Everyone should watch the
film “Moonlight,” the film that
won for Best Picture at the
Academy Awards. Why? Be-
cause it’s a very powerful story
of a poor black boy’s struggles
to reach adulthood with countless odds
stacked against him. Because it’s a relat-
able story for children and youth struggling
to make it to adulthood without being de-
railed by sexual orientation, violence and
drugs. Because it’s my or your story if we
faced perilous hurdles to survive, learn in
school and have a safe place to sleep at
night. Because it’s a too common Ameri-
can story — one not everyone wants to tell
and too few want or are ready to hear and
do anything about.
Moonlight is not only a moving coming
of age story but much more. It’s a window
into the terrors bred by pervasive struc-
tural poverty and racism in our boastfully
rich and still unequal nation. It is also a
story about homophobia and the struggle
of gay children to grow up in the midst of
that fear. It is the story of strength despite
daily threats petrifying a skinny, dreamy,
scruffy-looking eight-year old who can
hardly understand all the harsh realities
he faces and how he will overcome them
by
alone. It’s a painful story marked by pa-
rental neglect, abuse, fear, and despair.
Yet Moonlight is not a sad story but
one of hope, of resilience, love,
redemption, and second chances.
It’s a story that frees all Ameri-
cans to lift our veils of convenient
ignorance and scorn for gay black
boys and children, youths and
adults who face terrible choices
struggling to survive and grow up
all across America. That so many do with
their bodies and humanity not in complete
tatters is an example of fierce will and hu-
man resilience.
When my husband and I saw and dis-
cussed this brutally honest portrayal of
a young, poor, gay black boy struggling
to grow up in Miami’s Liberty City, we
decided to go back to see and experience
it again. For me it brought back a flood
of memories growing up as a black girl
in a small South Carolina town and time
when Jim Crow and homophobia reigned
but before drugs saturated and poisoned
our nation.
Most black children back then were
surrounded by caring black adults in our
close-knit community and faith congrega-
tions who buffered us against the segre-
gated and hostile outside world that told
us we weren’t worth much or were differ-
ent or inferior because of our skin color.
But there were a small group of black
children and adults who were pariahs and
shunned by many in the black communi-
ty — labeled “sissies” or “faggots” or bad
people. Some gossiped about and exclud-
ed them as abnormal because they were
gay and treated them as “others” which
too many still do in our nation.
Although we have seen a sea change
in protections for the LGBTQ commu-
nity we must finish the struggle, and ac-
cept and respect and protect all children
regardless of their race, sex, disability
or sexual orientation. Like Moonlight’s
Chiron, countless children still are being
“othered” by too many leaders, schools,
faith congregations, communities and
politicians who refuse to accept, often
bully, ostracize or discriminate against
them. Moonlight captures the impact of
the soul-scarring experience of being bul-
lied and the hidden layers of pain a child
born poor and black and gay often en-
dures. I hope Moonlight makes all of us
see ourselves and our children in Chiron
and so many like him.
The film captures the despair of our
vulnerable child pariahs grappling not
only with their sexual preferences on
top of their compounded daily burdens
of racism, poverty, parental drug addic-
tion, and violence. Moonlight does not
sensationalize Chiron’s life, play with
audience emotions, or make a political
statement. Instead it allows his story to
unfold from boyhood to manhood with
a powerful simplicity in many scenes re-
quiring no dialogue. How wonderful to
see Chiron finding moments of revelation
and joy amidst neglect, abuse and torment
at home and school. How sad that he be-
came a drug dealer as an adult after seeing
drugs ravish his own mother and that his
mother’s drug dealer and girlfriend were
his lifelines of survival. Chiron grows up
to sell drugs too because it is one of the
only pathways he sees as available to him
— a tragic story that plays out daily for
so many poor black boys who end up in
prison or dead because equal education
and jobs don’t exist and all the odds are
stacked against them in our economically
rich but spiritually anemic nation.
Moonlight’s director Barry Jenkins and
screenwriter Tarell McCraney grew up in
the same Liberty City neighborhood in
Miami as the boy in the film. They were
able to capture and share this extraordi-
nary story of struggle towards manhood
for the many fragile and invisible children
like Chiron still there struggling daily to
survive and reach adulthood in our too
heedless nation. Moonlight opens our
eyes and hearts. I hope more serious mov-
ing films will continue to open our eyes
and hearts to our country’s past and pres-
ent child abuse and neglect and move us
to affirm the humanity of all our children
and their right to a fair chance to grow up
safely and hopeful.
Marian Wright Edelman is president of
the Children’s Defense Fund.