Resist

Some of Marc’s notes from books (apologies for not quoting sources!), conversations and observations. Thanks to everyone whom i spoke or spent time with! (Photo by Dean Knuth).

We are complicit in a system that privileges the lives of some over others, ultimately denying the very humanity of millions - we can’t point to a ‘poverty Hitler’ or a ‘poverty Pinochet’ and just blame them as individuals.
What i have come to learn in the research so far, and therefore what i would like to come out in the film, is that we yearn for more meaningful experiences in life.
We are often mobilised by both fear and pleasure.  Fear means we will defend our ways of belief, our systems, before we will defend people.
We fear our loss of power and consumer ‘joys’, which in a very deep way is our ‘way of life’, which in a very deep way is connected to colonialism and the Old World Order.
If people suffer as a result of profit creation, we jump to defend this system, our ‘way of life’, ‘the dream’.
It is an apartheid system, privatised inside and surrounded by poverty outside.
To defend this system walls are being built all over the world.

This is why i think the wall between Mexico and America is a great starting point for the film.

What is a border, a wall?
The relatively rich and largely white world are generally free to travel and live wherever they would like and access the resources they need. Meanwhile the relatively poor and largely non white are typically forced to survive in places where there are not enough resources to provide sufficient livelihood.  In order to overcome their deprivation and insecurity, they risk their lives trying to overcome boundary controls put in place by the rich countries that reject them.

Maintaining an unjust world requires a lot of work.
The poor are not only the majority on the planet, they are everywhere.  This is why the essential activity of the rich today is the building of walls - walls of concrete, electronic surveillance, missiles, minefields, frontier controls and media screens.  The more panicked, the more insecure we become, the higher we build these walls.

What then is a wall? What does it represent? What does it say about our future?
Here are some words that i think might inspire the ‘feel’ of the film ...
- the maintenance of difference - us - them - exclusion - hierarchy - who belongs - who doesn’t - who is subordinate - who is ‘alien’, ‘illegal’, ‘outsider’ - 2 tier system - some have more rights than others - those who are served - those who do the serving - the ‘other’ - protecting ‘paradise’, the walled garden - israel wall - berlin wall - green zones - prison walls were used to keep in, but now they are built to keep people out - the prison has become the place of the poor, the damned of the world.
When i perceive walls from this perspective i think about ‘racism’ because racism is all about power structures and the rights you can access because of your geography or ancestry.
We can also relate the defense of ‘paradise’ to colonial ways of seeing the world, to ‘manifest destiny’ which was about the god given right and duty to conquer other peoples’ lands. Ref: this clip from a film i made a few years ago http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=O8HDjU6URqw&feature=channel_page
This way of running the world, dating back hundreds of years, has not changed.
Peoples’ ways of life have been destroyed by a system beyond their control, that they are forced to leave their homes in a search of survival. This system is allowed to ignore borders in the name of profit (goods and money can move freely), but some of the people it effects end up dying in an american desert searching for a better life.
So i believe the small human story of a death in the desert is deeply connected to a colonial worldview that plays itself out today through economics.
The rich have a fantasy that they can seal themselves off from the world living in a walled garden.  Other people’s gardens are destroyed and this sets people on the immigrant’s path.  The people that try to break in to Paradise are the very people who are displaced by the crisis the colonial system creates.

Starting at Mexico / USA border
This is the Southern edge of the American Empire where the so-called ‘third world’ rubs against the ‘first world’ and bleeds.
This border, more than any other in the world best represents what i think we are trying to critique in the film.
America is the world’s largest gated community living under a siege mentality, speaking about ‘invasions’, ‘illegals’, ‘aliens’ and ‘frontlines’.
The deaths of migrants in the desert are about the deaths of people trying to ‘break in’ at the very boundary between rich and poor, between the haves and have nots.
The common odyssey of these people is about the quest to move beyond poverty, to become fuller human beings.
Who are they? Why do they come? Why do they risk their life? What do they want? What route did they follow? What contacts helped them cross? How much did they pay? What’s going on inside - hopes, dreams, leaving their family, saying goodbye.

‘Show me a 50ft wall and i’ll show you a 51ft ladder’.
I have been researching the story of what happens to ‘recovered human remains’ once they are discovered in the desert and the journey they go on to be returned to their home, their family - I’ve spoken with people who make up the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle, from volunteers in the desert, to the forensic anthropologist, to the mexican consulate.
Migrants are crossing in increasingly isolated zones to avoid detection by the ever larger enforcement web throughout the border region. The US presumed that by making crossing more dangerous, less people would attempt it.  But the needs of migrants is greater than their fears and the number of people crossing has not fallen - the amount of deaths have increased. The ‘policy of deterrence’ does not work.
These dead bodies are discovered on an almost daily basis.
The film might begin with the discovery of the body, hence prompting the question, ‘how do you stop another dead body in the desert?’, prompting the deeper question ‘how do you bring down a wall?’.

Understanding the context - The push / pull effect.
To understand why millions of people are trying to ‘break in’ to America we have to understand the economic context that creates a push and pull effect.
We also need to understand why there has been such a rapid rise in deaths in the last decade.
America persuaded Mexico to adopt a corporate driven development strategy, the effects of which have massive destabalising effects.
This was done through loans, NAFTA and privatisation.
The effects of this on the majority of Mexicans triggered the need to journey North for work. In other words, the economic policies actually created an increase in migration. Economic refugees were created, people displaced in the name of ‘economic efficiency’.
The economic policies create a limitless supply of vulnerable workers.
At the same time, the lure of the ‘American Dream’ pulls people towards the North.
The American labour market, big business and the government, allows ‘illegals’ to work, which in turn keeps the costs of goods low and fills jobs that Americans don’t want to do.  This can be perceived as 21st century slavery where the US’s stability relies on these workers who have no rights, no unions and low wages (but 10 times higher than in Mexico).
There is of course a massive hypocrisy where on the one hand the system needs Mexican immigrants, and on the other the immigrants are persecuted.
And the US public are of course complicit and benefit from this.
(This is of course not just a mexico / usa / american dream specific problem - this is how economics works the world over).
The situation then is one where people are being forced to cross the border because of a global economic system enforced at home that is beyond their control. They are pushed north for work, they are being pushed into dangerous areas of the desert by ‘prevention through deterence’ political policies, and they are dying in ever increasing numbers ... and if they do make it over the border they work as modern day slaves with no rights.
So, it is at the border that we best see how the system directly leads to a person dying.
And it is alternatives to this system, to this way of perceiving the world, that we want to seek out in our journey in the film.

The quest for Solutions.
We can continue towards a future that is about protecting and shielding ourselves - an apartheid approach to the future ...
or we can change ourselves, policies and the way the future will be played out.
A wall is not just a physical wall, it impedes enlightened ways of seeing.
The post 9/11 generation have new questions and are searching for answers, new solutions, holes in the wall - they do not want global apartheid for their children.
They realise that what is happening on the other side of the wall really does matter, really does effect them. There are connections to be made and understood.
People who might live on the ‘good’ side of the wall are learning that it might not be the side they feel most comfortable with
eg An israeli refusenik soldier ... http://www.resistnetwork.com/research/contributions/show/80
A woman in South Africa who lives without walls http://www.resistnetwork.com/research/contributions/show/56
The journey of the film becomes a quest for solutions, for ‘how you stop more dead bodies in the desert’. 
But we are searching for system changing solutions, not just single issue solutions.
So, whilst of course there are great examples of people leaving water in the desert for people who are crossing, or people giving socks to migrants to stop blisters, we are looking for ways to create bigger systemic change.
We are looking for ways to bring down walls, we are looking for a way of seeing life that is not about divisions and power and exploitation - that instead opens up how we live.
Which side of the boundary you are born on should not effect the resources you have access to, how you live and die.

The quest will be one that seeks to change the idea of power and space, and extends human rights internationally. 
It is a search for ways of seeing and living that do not have a colonial perspective.
Where do people resist the forces of colonialism?
Where do people resist by staying still and not migrating? Who is defending their home, their place?
What other ways of seeing are there eg Ecological Debt, indigenous etc?
Is this essentially about the battle between the Christian and the ‘wild’?
Is there a new consciousness that goes beyond borders and nation states?
We need a new development paradigm eg a steady state economy?

We are seeking to understand that we are all interconnected and therefore we have rights as humans that transcend borders and ideologies.
We are seeking to understand what ‘life’ means in the full sense of the word.