Montague Reporter, Monday, May 4, 8:50 am

“Manager of an Avenue A property advises that a resident is screaming and yelling for an unknown reason and is disturbing her neighbors. Responding officer reports that the involved party, possibly intoxicated, is experiencing dental pain and is unable to find a ride to the dentist.”

On Friday nights I catch up on local news by reading the Reporter, whose print edition arrives that day in my mailbox. I never miss the Police Log, with its description of certain aspects of street life: the car accidents, inebriated individuals refusing to leave the local gas station, youth parties in the restricted Lake Pleasant reservoir (where I sneak with the dogs on weekend days), drug busts, neighbors yelling at each other, black-outs. All the news that’s fit to print.

I have two favorite ones from the past year:

“911 caller from Sunderland states that someone is in her home and the walls are missing.”

The other is: “Party previously reported missing called in stating he is not missing.”

But the opening item, read last Friday night, affected me differently. Someone, man or woman, screams and disturbs neighbors because of excruciating dental pain and no one offers to find or provide a ride to the dentist. Instead, the person is reported to the police. True, s/he person may be intoxicated, but alcohol does deaden pain.

People often scream with pain, only more silently. They scream over medical care they can’t afford. They cry because their children are neglected by teachers and underfunded schools  and therefore can’t fulfill their potential (local schools here are merging in order to survive). There are tears over family separations and jobs and homes lost, disappearing flora and fauna, and a fraying of communal and family bonds they once took for granted. There is also a lot of fear.

What do many do? We cultivate opinions: She must be a drunk; he never has any money; that’s what happens with an inadequate tax base; he’s sick because he’s obese; they didn’t have good parents; she should have gone to college. And of course, there’s the Wizard of Oz in the City of Oz, a/k/a Washington, DC, who likes to daily test our nerves to such an extent that we end up feeling sorry for ourselves or sunk in pessimism and gloom.

What we often don’t do is say: “Jump in, I’ll take you to the dentist.” You may not be my favorite neighbor, you may look askance at me and I at you, but there’s this pain. Throbbing, relentless pain. In the face of that, why would anyone call the police? Are they hoping the police will enforce a pain-free environment?

We’ve all seen people in pain, their faces rigid, eyes half their regular size, faces shrunken and shriveled, adult bodies curled into fetuses to make themselves small, even invisible, to the pain that’s charging in through the door. And we’ve seen them after they take painkillers of some kind, their faces slowly smoothening with relief, their fists unclenched, their breaths more even, falling asleep because pain takes such a toll on us beyond the nerves it hits.

I’m in pain. Don’t call law enforcement, call a doctor. A dentist. A pharmacy. You may not like me, you may think that people like me are what’s wrong with this country, but I’m in pain. See it, talk to me, help me.

I remember my time in Selma, Alabama, last April and seeing homes with no doors or windows because chronic poverty and a tornado afflicted the city with no relief from state government. Why do people live this way, some wonder. But they know; we know. “We’re one body,” Bernie used to say. “You gash your arm, you don’t make up an opinion about it, you hurry up to wash the wound and bandage it.”

When I think of our Wizard of Oz in our House of Oz, denied, at least today, funding for his Ballroom of Oz, I think that he is an icon for the big Buddhist poisons. His greed is relentless: crypto accounts, slush funds, businesses masquerading as diplomacy. His anger seems unending, especially at those who wouldn’t certify him as winner of the 2020 presidential elections and who have opposed certain of his bills in Congress; he has never heard of the word forgiveness. And ignorance, shorthand for how he sees himself as apart and separate from everyone else.

We’ve had other presidents with vices, but never such a conglomerate, never so deeply etched and unchanging. An old-fashioned word comes to mind: villainy. And it has its price, not just now but later, too. Some pay that price way more than others.

We started organizing a local committee to be in solidarity with immigrant families. At first, members of the group met very close to home to talk about what was going on. Did I have to participate, after doing some of this work for 6 years? Yes. Not because they weren’t highly capable, caring, and energetic, but because of my training in bearing witness.

We can’t meet here no matter how comfortable it makes us, I told them, we have to go to Turners Falls where they live. We have to meet with them, build relationships, and discover from them what is needed.

Easier said than done. There was little trust and a great deal of disbelief that some Anglos they never met wish to be of help. But last night we had our second in-person gathering, this time with food. In the first, 5 young people showed up. When I arrived last night to join four others, they looked at the huge bowl of fruit salad in my hands and someone said, “You might be making lots of fruit shakes with that.” And then 20 people showed up, mostly parents with children.

We ate deliciously, sat around a big shower curtain that showed the world and held up by two of us, went around, and each person pointed out where they or their forbears came from. The message was clear: We were all immigrants. We had come from all over, often undergoing great risk and hardship. Immigration was all our story.

And as Bernie promised, when you bear witness, action arises. One person was offered construction and gardening projects. Three different people asked for help learning English and found partners for this. I think of one in particular, a pretty young woman so shy she wouldn’t open her mouth, but finally said that she wants to go to school for dentistry if she could only speak the language. The next time I looked around, an older woman from the committee was sitting across from her making dates and times for one-on-one learning.

Jimena was there to help translate, offering her place of work where the two could meet because the young woman was too insecure to meet elsewhere.

Not-knowing is letting go of your opinions. Bear witness: come as close as possible, ram your nose smack against real-life situations and real-life people, and you’ll find out what to do very naturally. Links and phone numbers of aid agencies is nice, but they’re no replacement for being there,in person, one body sitting across from another body, one face across from another, one smile echoing another.

Visiting Minneapolis in February, I witnessed what it took to organize entire neighborhoods. It took us three months to build enough trust for 25 people, Anglos and Latinos, immigrants all, to come together over a potluck, talk about what we have in common (love of food, children, need for jobs, laughter). It’s happening, I thought to myself. Slowly slowly, not one day one day, but now. It’s happening.

Jimena took me aside, and after asking for $450 to cover drivers ed for three immigrants applying for the all-important driver’s license (I wrote her a check out of the immigrants account right there), reminded me that we need money for summer camp for children whose parents work from early morning to late at night on farms. Schools will close by end of June and summer camp begins July 6.

They charge $1,320 for 6 weeks of camp and Jimena got it down to $550; I call it a steal. She’s very persuasive, but also does translation for them and a host of miscellaneous services as part of the payment. I don’t know where she has the energy and time, and I sometimes worry about her health. But there it is: a dozen young children for 6 weeks of summer camp, totaling $6,600.

This is something that we have managed to do four years running. It’s the very opposite of the attributes of the great Wizard: giving rather than stealing, generosity rather than avarice; fun activities around the pool and river, arts and plenty of laughter instead of insults and rage; and deep caring and empathy instead of the ignorance that proclaims: Me! Me! Me!

Wouldn’t you prefer to support that rather than spend valuable energy fulminating and tearing out your hair about the Wizard? You don’t have to call a doctor, be the doctor by  donating using the button below, Donate to Immigrant Families. Make children happy. Give parents peace of mind. Remember your own immigrant roots. Helping makes everyone happy, said H. H. Dalai Lama.

If you want to fulminate in addition, do so at no extra charge. You may be less inclined to do that after this act of generosity. The button is below.

Thank you for your kindness.