Justice Journey 2025: Part 3

If you haven't gone to part 1 and 2, go do that. If you've come this far, I hope you've remembered to breathe.

Here's some of what I (Jill) wrote in my journal on the way back from Basile.

Remember it's unprocessed, raw, centered on MY feelings, and mostly unedited because this is really an excerpt.

I'm only 40 years old. Why have I seen Greece 3 times? Like the entire country, not for fun but because the refugee camps for the Syrians, Iranians, and Afghans were spread across the entire country. Why have I driven the entirety of Serbia for the same reason?

Why can I not think of the Aegean Sea without my heart pounding, knowing what I know.

By 16 I'd been to Ft. Benning in Georgia to protest against the School of the Americas. Why have I sat on a toll booth in Tornillo, TX for DAYS watching busloads of children being shipped in to live in tents in the desert?

Tell me why I know exactly where to get Venezuelan candy in Chicago. Why did I need to know EXACTLY how to set up a refugee settlement and why have I needed to know how to do that more than once.

I don't want to know where Sandra Bland is buried. I don't want to know where to get flowers near the cemetery where she is buried. But I do.

I don't want to recognize folks in her documentary because we've happened to meet each other for the same reasons in different places SO MANY TIMES.

I don't want the memory of being at graduation as a school board member, holding a Keffiyeh in my pocket waiting for the right moment to put it on so I knew they wouldn't make a scene and rip it off me or drag me away. I don't want to remember the look on the faces of the trusted teachers and trusted admin as I took it out to put it on. The fear of what would happen when I put it on. I don't want the memory of how I shook when I put it on. The way my chest tightened, the way I couldn't put words together as I walked on stage in front of everyone with it on.

I don't want for today to NOT be the first time I've witnessed the waving and acknowledgement from people behind bars.

I want to be a little kid again. Playing outside, swimming, riding my bike. I grew up in privilege. When I think of summers when I was little I think about what I want everyone to experience every damn day. Popsicles, big wheels, surrounded by love. No disruption or kidnapping.

I was told things about this country that would lead me to believe that it was good. A good, fair, safe place. The amount of times I've had to use my body and my privilege in the face of cops with zip ties holds major issue with those lies I was told.

The richest, best democracy, freest country on the planet shouldn't need folks like me to sit in front of ICE agents, block intersections with our bodies, or gather 10s of thousands of people to take power back from a government funded by kidnapping and exploitation.

This isn't what life is supposed to be like. I don't buy that in my 40 years I've done all that knowing there is plenty more to come and it's just got to be this way. That's bullshit. There has got to be something better.

That's it for now. This journal entry was very much centered on me, my experiences, and my feelings. I wasn't processing what we saw, I wasn't fully there in this moment while I was writing this. Shit was hard, man. I just wrote.

There's a lot more processing and breathing and breaking locks and #FuckIce work to do. So that's what we'll do.

See you out there.