The Heart is a Beating Drum

At first I thought that what I was hearing was the sounds of drums in the distance.

“Great,” I thought to myself. “Here comes the drum circle.” I looked down the road, waiting to see the obligatory group of blond men with dreadlocks strolling along barefoot, drums in hand.

But all I saw was more people who were closer in appearance to me—a middle-aged lady in sensible shoes—then the cliched image we often (myself included) picture at these kind of events. You know who I’m talking about: the ones who look like they came directly from Woodstock via an Occupy protest. The left Left.

But I didn’t see anyone like that. I did see clergy, and lay people, and grandmothers (one who had brought her teenage grandson), and elected Arizona representatives. But no drums. So where was the drumming coming from?

And that’s when I realized it wasn’t drumming I was hearing off in the distance. It was pounding. It was the desperate, continuous beating of bare hands against plexiglass windows, and it was coming from the detention center we all stood outside, the one where they only held women and children, the one we weren’t allowed to be closer to than a football field away, because this was “private property,” which meant that while this prison belonged to someone it didn’t belong to the people who were paying for it, the Americans who were standing outside in the dark holding our tiny candles aloft, listening to the same sounds that are heard coming from the rubble of a collapsed building, from behind the wall of rocks in a mining disaster. The sounds that say, universally, “I am here. Save me.”

We stood there for two hours.

The pounding never stopped.

Or maybe it did, after we left. After the lights of our candles had gone out and we had all solemnly walked away, back to our homes and our comfortable beds, and, most importantly of all, back to our families.

Of the many speakers we heard from at the Eloy vigil, the one I can’t seem to get out of my head was the woman named Suzanne who told the story of her grandmother, an American citizen of Japanese descent who, while confined in an American internment camp on American soil during World War II gave birth to premature twins. “We only have one incubator,” the doctors told her. “Pick.” And she did. Which is why Suzanne grew up with one uncle, instead of two.

“That is terrible,” I thought to myself.

“This is terrible,” my Self replied.

Whatever your thoughts on immigration are, both legal and otherwise, I find it difficult to believe that you can support the mass internment of immigrants in over-crowded, abusive conditions. And before you reply with the assertion that the conditions are, in fact, “completely adequate,” think back to that pounding. People held in “adequate” conditions Do. Not. Do. That. And people who still have some compassion left do not imply that they would.

As I walked away that night I found myself actually wishing that there had been a drum circle after all—and not just because it would have been better to hear that than the chaotic pounding. But because even though I may mock the drum circle, I get that it can represent community in a deeply primal way that nothing else can. It is, at its best, the sound of all of our hearts beating together as one. It is the sound of the humanity in me joining in with the humanity in you.

And that is a sound I think we could all stand to hear a little bit more of right about now.