OPINION
Page 6 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
April 3, 2017
Volume 27 Number 7
April 3, 2017
ISSN: 1094-9453
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TALKING STORY IN ASIAN AMERICA
n Polo
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The Safety Pin
Best intentions, solemn commitments
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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.
Then, as if on cosmic cue, a Facebook notification
buzzed my sleepy iPhone. Kathleen D. Gunnell
Saadat was posting about the Portland Safety Pin.
The 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. “Safe” from our super-nationalist leaders
and their suddenly enabled followers.
Ibu Kathleen Saadat, if you haven’t met, is living
history. One of our River City anchor elders. On this
moody Tuesday night she was using social media to
set out what her muscular generation expects from
the next one. From us.
In her post, Ibu Kathleen wrote about a couple
gathering her in their arms when an angry man
yelled all kinds of racial awfulness at her. It
happened before our current turn toward societal
instability, well before our Safety Pin. “No one
helped,” she said, “until I called to a passing couple
and asked for help. They were white. They did not
hesitate.”
“People who choose to wear a safety pin,” Ibu
Kathleen continued in the tone characteristic of all
elder aunties on 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.
I
Executive Order 9066 anniversary
Ibu Kathleen’s gamble that night was big. The
biggest. Indeed, ask any River City ethnic-stream
elder and they’ll recount seven decades of fumbled
foreign-policy
promises,
our
constitution’s
amnesiac 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
“No one helped, until I called
to a passing couple and asked
for help. They were white.
They did not hesitate.”
-- Kathleen D. Gunnell Saadat
neighbors. These families asking for help again,
from Anglo America, is big.
Sharing a nation made of our best intentions, 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. Roosevelt’s
Executive Order 9066 sent 120,000 elders, parents,
and their children to barbed-wire compounds.
Portlanders’ babies were born under the guard of
U.S. Army riflemen.
Only those of us committed, as Kathleen Saadat
said, “to get directly involved,” can mend these
neighbors’ hearts and bones. Pronouncing 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. Chávez
and the Reverend 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
necessary. Bottom line: The Pin requires some pain.
Commitment is like that.
But there’s a big prize. The biggest. At the end of
Ibu Kathleen Saadat’s essay, she says the five
sweetest words you’ll ever hear during your short
stay on our shared little blue planet — “I will never
forget them.” Meaning, that kind couple who em-
braced her fears. Meaning those lovely Portlanders
ready to close the awful distance between best
Continued on page 7
Opinions expressed in this newspaper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of this publication.