We all know that our world can be a harsh, cruel place at times. There is always some measure of cruelty, hate or injustice ready to upset our lives. That is why we all need sanctuaries, places where we can feel safe in our potentially dangerous world.
It could be in a neighborhood where people watch out for each other. It could be a place where the crime rate is relatively low, or a somewhat remote home, set apart from others where strangers rarely dare to roam at the end of dead end roads. Many homes today also have sophisticated alarm and surveillance systems, and the owners feel that help is only minutes away through electronic 911 emergency response teams.
A good many of us who live here on Whidbey Island imagine that we have arrived in a place of relative sanctuary. The crime, the pollution, the fierce winds, the droughts, the fires and the floods are mostly elsewhere. And maybe we are relatively insulated from a good deal of the misery that we learn about elsewhere. However, if we are completely honest with ourselves, we recognize that our separateness and sense of safety is not entirely justified. We should have learned that during the height of the pandemic, when we had people infected, hospitalized, and some died here as well. Our island was not spared the common fate of our society during the pandemic.
The good news is that after an initial period of panic, we all started to work together to make it through the danger. The small farming and gardening sanctuary a group of us established at Thompson Road and Highway 525, the 11-acre home of South Whidbey Tilth, tried to do our part back then by making our farmers market one of a few safe outdoor community events during that period.
More recently our group has needed to set up a surveillance camera near our entrance to try and reduce theft and vandalism there. So we are not unaware of the potential for trouble at a site such as ours that welcomes the public to a farmers market, community gardens, agriculturally oriented workshops and demonstration gardens. What we didn’t expect was new trouble directed at our new farming neighbors.
For three years now an energetic young BIPOC (Black, indigenous, people of color) community, mainly residing today over on the mainland, has been busy establishing their own 11-acre farmstead next door to our project. We have welcomed their presence there and the possibilities for collaboration over time. They have been slowly creating the infrastructure needed to raise poultry and grow food on their site. Their progress was set back recently by a terrible act of vandalism, when someone broke into their secure storage unit and set fire to expensive equipment brought to the site for farm production. While vandalism and theft on our own site suggests that there has always been some potential for bad actors to visit us, this act has a smell of hostility based upon the racial character of our neighbors.
There are lessons we can take from our experience during the COVID years that can help us weather challenges such as those that we face today. Once again we need to remind ourselves that our fates are linked, that we all exist within a greater realm of connection. This attack on our neighbors is an attack on our greater community, and we need to double our vigilance and extend a helping hand to them today, and others like them whenever it is needed, to good neighbors new and old, like the Black Seed BIPOC community farm project here.
It is also good to remind ourselves that once again this year we are being asked to participate in the process of choosing who will govern us locally and nationally. Who will we give the power to implement our laws, oversee the administration of public health or social services, provide for public safety, and the like? The predominantly white Christian conservative movement has its own new plans for governing our multiethnic and multicultural society if they win the upcoming election. Their 2025 project agenda calls for such things as the mass deportation of undocumented non-white, non-English speaking people who have sought asylum in the US. The program also calls for measures to suppress non-gender conforming and non-heterosexual people. Our system of government has so far extended legal sanctuary to such people. Your vote this fall will decide whether or not we are a society of inclusion or exclusion, one that extends sanctuary to more people or to fewer in the years to come.
Dr. Michael Seraphinoff is a Whidbey Island resident, a former professor at Skagit Valley College and academic consultant to the International Baccalaureate Organization.
