Because I am involved in mankind...

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.

--John Donne,  Meditation XVII from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

This semester I'm teaching a seminar on John Donne. My students and I are reading a significant selection of his poetry and prose (from the inadequate Modern Library edition), so we have spent the fall with the lusty young Donne of the "Songs and Sonets," the self-righteous Donne of the "Satyrs," and the grieving Donne of the "Epicedes and Obsequies." Today we encountered the sick Donne of the Devotions.

As I was re-reading to prepare for class, the famous passage from Meditation XVII took on new resonance, especially in light of the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Armistice ending World War I and the massing of troops at the US border immediately before the election to "harden the border" before the arrival of refugees from South America. 

I realized that this Donne is not just the sick Donne, or the pious Donne; it is the ethical and empathetic Donne, who sees himself "involved in mankind," who recognizes himself in his fellow human beings. 

And that led me to contemplate, as I do every morning, what seems to have gone wrong in our society--we have failed to be "involved in mankind," to recognize ourselves in others. We see it in our language describing the dead soldiers of World War I or the refugees on their desparate migration northward. Today, the Los Angeles Times reports that Customs and Border Patrol plans “to install and pre-position port hardening infrastructure equipment in preparation for the migrant caravan,” at the San Ysidro port of entry near San Diego. 

A collocates search on the NOW Corpus suggests just how "dehumanized" the word "caravan" is. Among the top 500 collocates, we see words suggesting national identity (Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican) and words suggesting political status (asylum-seekers, migrant), but not one word that focuses on the shared humanity of the migrants (men, women, children). While we can't rely on collocation patterns to reveal exactly what people believe, we can rely on them to suggest speech patterns across large text sets. 

When we talk about the people migrating toward the US border with Mexico, we don't talk about them as people. I think that John Donne, across the centuries, encourages us to become "involved in mankind" and take "upon us the misery of our neighbours."