A Call to People of Conscience

I was sitting alone recently on the Number 11 bus riding from South Providence to my apartment on the East Side. The wood and concrete creatures so typical of urban poverty stood firm as they always do on Broad Street, a central thoroughfare for all spectators and participants of Rhode Island's long and committed experiment with social and economic inequality.

My eyes jumped from one article to another as I skimmed the pages of the day's newspaper. The war was all the rage. Our troops pushed through Iraq facing sandstorms and soldiers, listed in order of importance, and Baghdad was but days away. Or so said the newspaper in those days when "shock and awe" might actually have shocked and awed and a $75,000,000,000 price tag hadn't yet been revealed.

And then, from out of that part of one's heart that awakens only when one wishes pain and sorrow existed only in fiction, my eyes stopped moving. Tucked into an article about Iraqi violations of the Geneva Convention and the need to protect supply lines was a name and a place that quickly caught my attention: Edgar Hernández, Mission, Texas.

Unless you have managed to avoid this war altogether, you too know Edgar. You know him as the scared 21-year-old with short hair and round face who became a prisoner of war in the first days of our invasion. He and several other young soldiers had the misfortune of losing their way in the vast desert of southern Iraq only to be found by Iraqi troops and made famous by the miracle of television.

I had never met Edgar. Until Tuesday I didn't know he was from Mission. In fact he isn't. He's from Alton, a community of 3,500 just outside of Mission. There isn't much in Alton but good people, a small church, and a convenience store.

I learned of Alton when I was a child growing up in McAllen about 10 miles east of this tight-knit community where everyone speaks Spanish and reporters appear only once every 15 years. That's how often something horrendous happens in Alton.

This time it's Edgar, 15 years ago it was a Coca-Cola truck crashing into a crowded school bus knocking it into a large pit filled with caliche and a bit of water. Crosses still cover the intersection where 21 children died that day. It is still the worst school bus accident in Texas' history and those of us who grew up in the area still refer to that day in one word: Alton.

This war is terrible. It is terrible because it is unlawful and unjust, but it is also terrible because it takes so many of our young people of color and places them on an altar where their sacrifice brings no remedy to the problems that our communities suffer.

My classmates, my friends, my neighbors, my cousins fight in the name of freedom and liberty, but they don't fight to ameliorate the racism and poverty that plague Alton, South Texas, Detroit, East Los Angeles or South Providence.

How I wish that Edgar were fighting to eliminate the 36-percent poverty rate in his hometown or to create good jobs in Alton so that the 15 percent of his family and neighbors who can't find jobs can live the dream we so often hear about. What would have been of Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick or Tattered Tom if they were Ricardo from El Paso or Tim from Harlem?

Would they have been among the 4 percent of raza men between 20 and 30 years old or the 12 percent of black men that age who live behind the barbed wire and steel doors of one of our nation's most profitable hospitality industries: prisons?

Instead of following orders that sent him into the hands of Iraq's soldiers, why wasn't Edgar fighting against an economic and education system that gives young South Texas Latinos three options: the military, minimum wage jobs or the migrant farm worker circuit?

Couldn't Edgar's brave and energetic spirit been better served fighting the forces that make disposable commodities of people of color throughout this nation?