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Susan Roe
No Hidden Meanings
Week after week, my favorite public television program features shots of (mostly) elderly men and women crowded together in long, seemingly endless lines, dwarfed by vast and anonymous enclosures. Stoically cradling their most precious possessions in their arms, or hauling them on makeshift wagons, they tentatively shuffle forward. A few young children dart in and out of the lines, but teenagers and young adults are almost entirely absent from the scene. Other shots reveal that these lines have a terminal point: a series of collapsible metal tables at which officious men and women quickly inspect the proffered Cane Rack or Fruit Lamp, then direct the owners of these items elsewhere. Is this, you ask, a program about uprooted populations, the victims of war, famine, ethnic cleansing? Are these refugees, bribing border guards on their way to political asylum in some neutral country?
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