Buddhism During The Trump Years

Read the full essay at the magazine Tricycle

To begin with, I should tell that you it was not the strangest conversation I have ever had. That it happened in the afternoon. That the day was warm, and I was flying that evening out of Miami, where I had done a reading and visited my parents. I had about an hour to visit my cousin, and I should tell you that I like this cousin. He is funny and smart and gay, and since I, too, am queer, I imagine we share a kinship beyond blood ties.

I should tell you that this cousin usually makes me laugh. That he almost died of liver failure a few years ago but survived and now apparently watches a lot of Fox TV news, which perhaps explains why on this afternoon, sitting in his living room, he tried to convince me that someone had paid thousands of immigrants to leave Central America for the US-Mexico border. “Do you really think all those people walked on foot for weeks, and no one paid them?” he asked me.

The shades had been drawn to keep the apartment cool. When I said nothing, my cousin repeated his question. He was referring to a lie that had started on social media and that had been supported by the Trump administration, which blamed the migration of Central American families on funding from billionaire George Soros. The lie was racially coded language. In blaming Soros, the Trump administration was pushing old anti-Semitic claims that a sinister Jewish cabal was secretly using its wealth to undermine white Christian society.

“C’mon, tell me what you think,” my cousin insisted. But we are Facebook friends. He already knew what I thought, and we both knew that he himself had arrived in the United States less than twenty years ago and had asked for asylum just like my father had done in the 1960s. What could I possibly say?

People who think immigrants are necessarily pro-immigrant have not met my family. If they did, they would know that my father voted for Trump and that another one of my cousins thinks all newly arrived immigrants should get “at the back of the line” and enter the country legally like her father did in the 1970s. In fact, her father, like mine and generations of Cubans, arrived in this country illegally and seeking asylum, much like Central Americans today. But Americans don’t generally talk about Cubans as asylum seekers, because the US government broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba at the start of the 1960s and began to consider people like my father to be political exiles. (Often the difference between asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants is decided by a group of white men in Washington, DC.)

I wish I could say now that the conversation with my cousin about immigrant families at the border was the strangest, most troubling one I have experienced recently. It wasn’t. One of my students, whose father is from South America, wrote an essay about bullying someone for speaking Spanish. When I suggested viewing the situation from the other girl’s perspective, she explained that she could not feel compassion. She didn’t say “eye for an eye,” but she may as well have. And before that, one of my dearest friends explained to me that she was not bothered about the president of the Philippines ordering death squads to execute people. No criminal charges. No trial or judge. President Duterte has people murdered and brags about it. The Philippines is where she was born and where her mother still lives. No, my friend wasn’t bothered. “He’s killing the drug dealers,” she told me flatly.

My mind stopped, and so did the words in my mouth. I felt trapped inside a bad novel set in Nazi Germany or in Rwanda during the genocide or in Argentina in the time of the Dirty War.