#axtell

Axtell

“Here is my religion: How you treating my family? Or should I say, mi familia?  How you treating my neighbors? How you treating the least among us?” - Michael Perry

On June 13th of this year my best friend, Julian Hernandez returned to the United States after a painfully long absence. It was a day of victory and success. It was a day he earned through nine months of being prodded like a science experiment and questioned like a criminal. 

I remember saying goodbye in October. A goodbye we all hoped would be the last of its kind. My sadness was the least of it as he returned to a country that didn’t feel like home. His fiance, Katrina, concurrently endured a brutal northern Minnesota winter - alone. 

We watched and experienced our own lives; connected only through voice notes and video chats as the world continued to unfurl in front of us. Gender politics, femicide, war, travel bans, corruption. A strike of misery that seemed to reach from here to Argentina and beyond. 

We watched the warriors and the voices of opposition continue their fight. Losing sometimes, but still fighting, even then. We watched as we navigated our own run-ins with these systems. Julian shared his frustration with a process that felt like a set up for failure. We all struggled with the lack of answers. Knowing what the next step was, but never certain when. 

It was clear that within most of this process, Julian was “one of something.” He was an immigrant, a foreigner, a threat, a potential burden on the state. And meanwhile, we’d have late night discussions about what it means to be good or bad. I spent a lot of time wondering how you can boil it down to a checkbox. A “Yes” or a “No”. Approved, or rejected. It was their job to filter the applicants and to keep everyone safe from the dangerous ones. From the monsters. 

I continued to wonder as a new wave of headlines came. “Kids in cages.” “Tender age camps.” “Families separated.” I listened to people preach the importance of our imaginary line in the sand. I listened to our president mock people, spout lies, and justify terrible things. I buried my face in my hands as he condemned his own actions, and attributed them to someone else. I spent too many hours hoping the news, the online communities, the facebook messages - anything - could tell me why this was necessary, or at least who was responsible. Someone ordered this to happen, and by some force that order was turned to action. Was it bureaucrats? Soldiers? Police? How could anyone do this, and who exactly are these soulless beasts?

The day Julian came back we all sat in my apartment and listened to the first early version of his band’s newest EP, ‘And Now’. I took in the stories that inspired each song, and one that struck me harder than the rest was a track called Humans. 

Humans is a song born of his experience with customs and border patrol, and being processed through a system designed to keep the “threats” away from “the rest of us.”

It’s a song that resonated with me beyond his own experience and felt profoundly relevant the world as we’re experiencing it now. I was reminded of the humanity beyond the headlines and of the stories behind the spectacles. 

Most importantly I was reminded that those who look or think or act differently from me are not beasts, just as we are not monsters. Maybe we’re scared or confused. Maybe we are lied to and used. Maybe we’re fed up, or maybe we’re desperate. Maybe we are those things, but definitely we are one thing. We are humans. We are all humans, and in the end, there are no beasts nor monsters at all. There is only us.

“I know that they’re humans, and no one is perfect, but you don’t seem to know what it’s like… Yes, I know that they’re humans, but do they think the same of me?” - Julian Hernandez

A complete of video sources can be found below.