“Who are these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?” — Woody Guthrie
- On June 8, 2024, Israeli forces raided the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza to rescue four hostages, incidentally killing two hundred Palestinians and wounding four hundred, afterward blocking ambulances from transporting victims to the one over-taxed hospital still in operation. Body bags in the streets laid a white river, another tributary to the sea of rage. American media reported the names of the four hostages, though none of the Palestinians.
- Woody Guthrie wrote one of his last great songs, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” after the New York Times published the names of four Americans killed when their plane went down in Los Gatos Canyon in January, 1948, but left unidentified the twenty-eight braceros, migrant farm workers, mostly Mexican, who also perished in the crash. A writer named Tim Z. Hernandez researched the names and on Labor Day 2013 a memorial headstone was placed at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno for those workers who never lived to “pay all their money to wade back again.” It’s hard to imagine it happening, you’ll agree, without Woody’s righteous anger.
- Shall we lie to ourselves and pretend that race and class had no part in these injustices, one group of lives valued more than the other, one group “more like us” than the other? Where is the monument to those cut down at Nuseirat, almost as surely with our American tax dollars as those bracerosdeported after harvesting our peaches and oranges? When do you think the New York Times will get around to reporting their names? Who will be their Woody Guthrie, and how shall we remember those we cannot name?
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Thomas R. Smith
Art Rupert Loydell
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