The Time of Marches and Rallies

I hadn't gotten around to posting my sketches from the March for Our Lives on March 24. I went with a group of friends and we all marched and we all cried as kids at the rally after the march talked about their experiences with gun violence.

'This was mostly the same group of people I attended the Women's March with in January of 2017. Since November of 2016 I've attended more marches, signed more petitions, made more calls to elected officials, and given more money to political causes than I ever thought I would. 

And that all means that I am the problem. I should have been doing all of that all along. I should have paid attention. But I had the privilege not to.

I'm certainly paying attention now. Baby jails and racist policies and all of the other insanity makes it hard not to. 
Monday I attended the Border Action Meeting to Support Asylum Seekers organized by Indivisible Memphis and hosted at Shady Grove Presbyterian.

The event was pretty amazing because it was organized by regular people. Indivisible Memphis is (to my understanding) a loose affiliation of people with similar goals for our community. Official organizations such as Latino Memphis and the Community Legal Center were there giving us real information - and asking for donations, which I encourage, too. But the people who attended were young and old people, black and white and Jewish and Christian and Muslim - who are all fed up and want to do something.
We talked about raising funds for commissary accounts for detainees, helping the families left behind when people are detained, helping local family sponsors. Some people volunteered to sponsor families seeking asylum. Some people started planning trips to the border and to detention facilities.

One of the things that a lot of us did was attend the Families Belong Together Memphis Action Rally today at Gaisman Park. There were hundreds of people there - fitting the description of the previous crowd - all there in support of our neighbors who are getting hauled off by ICE, separated from their families, terrorized.
There is so much more to be done so let's keep this momentum going.