Dear friends,
During the month of October, one million tourists will flood the city of Salem. I live in Lynn (the City of Sin– I love that moniker) and I am only a stone’s throw away from Salem. Halloween is becoming the quintessential American holiday and like Christmas, it begins in August. I have to admit– I do love the pageantry of Halloween– the masks, elaborate costumes, and the fascination with the dark history of the Salem witch trials. Halloween is a strange mingling of horror and fun– having a reason to consume an obscene amount of candy also doesn’t hurt.
Why do so many of us enjoy Halloween? When I wrestled with this incredibly important existential question (ok, I’m exaggerating a bit), I thought about a week long series of interviews in 1962 that French director, Francois Truffaut, had with Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense. What I found compelling about these interviews is that Truffaut observed that in all of Hitchcock’s films, the camera angle told the story– the script and the actors were secondary in the narrative. For example, Hitchcock used “kill angles.” These included: the “God angle”– you knew someone was about to be murdered when the angle of the camera was looking down on the action; and the “victim angle”– actor Janet Leigh looking up at the shower head before she was brutally murdered in the classic horror movie “Psycho.”
Unfortunately, the drama that is playing out in our immigrant communities involves “kill angles.” In the media, we see images of car windows being smashed as immigrants are dragged out. Immigrant families are suffering the horror of separation as breadwinners are detained and families are in danger of being evicted from their homes. School administrators and staff across the state are reporting a sharp rise in students requiring trauma counseling because of family separation or the threat of separation. Our immigrant families are living in real life horror and the federal government is using intimidation tactics to instill fear and anxiety in our communities.
As a way to provide much needed housing and food, MIC is launching an Emergency Assistance Campaign. Our goal between now and the end of the year is to raise $100,000. Please donate through our website or the button below. Every dollar that is donated will be used to assist our immigrant families during this critical time.
