Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
W. H. Auden, “Refugee Blues”, Selected Poems
An airport terminal turned into an impromptu cathedral of resistance, January 2017, people holding signs like talismans against the machinery of bureaucratic cruelty. I can’t help but invoke Auden, that magnificent bastard who understood that when empires get scared, they start building walls with bodies.
“Yet there’s no place for us, my dear.”
Airports are these weird purgatory zones where everyone’s suspended between somewhere and nowhere, existing in this fluorescent-lit nowhereland that smells like recycled air and desperation. The absurdity of it: the most American space imaginable, this temple to motion and commerce and the illusion of freedom, suddenly becoming the frontline. All those expensive consultants who designed SFO for “passenger experience” and “traffic flow” never imagined it would host a moral reckoning at Gate 48.
Perfect place for a protest, actually. Because what is a refugee but someone caught in permanent transit? Someone the world has decided exists in the passive voice, to be detained, to be processed, to be denied.
These are people who showed up because something in their gut told them this was the line, this was the moment when you either bear witness or you become complicit through silence.
And Auden knew, back in 1939 with fascism on the march, that the language of exclusion always sounds so reasonable. So necessary. It’s always about “security” and “proper procedures” and “we’re just following orders.” The banality of evil wears a tie and carries a clipboard.
Tech workers and grad students and people who drove from Oakland and strangers who became a temporary “we” because sometimes that’s all you’ve got. The desperate optimism of believing that showing up matters. That bearing witness counts for something. That maybe, just maybe, enough noise in the right place at the right time can gum up the machine.
They weren’t naïve, those people. They knew one protest at one airport wouldn’t topple the executive order. But they understood something deeper: that resistance is also about refusing to let cruelty become normalized. About making it cost something, even if that cost is just discomfort, inconvenience, attention.
The human animal needs its rituals, its moments of collective defiance. We need to gather in the spaces of power, not the halls of power, we’re not allowed there, but the spaces, and make ourselves visible. Make ourselves loud.
Because the alternative is accepting that some people are disposable. That “some are living in mansions, some are living in holes” is just the natural order of things. That “we cannot go there now” is an acceptable answer to give someone whose crime was being born in the wrong zip code on the wrong side of an arbitrary line we call a border.