Published on Sunday, September 23, 2001 in the Los
Angeles Times
A Pure, High Note of Anguish
by Barbara Kingsolver
TUCSON -- I want to do something to help right now.
But I can't give blood (my hematocrit always runs too
low), and I'm too far away to give anybody shelter or
a drink of water. I can only give words. My verbal
hemoglobin never seems to wane, so words are what I'll
offer up in this time that asks of us the best
citizenship we've ever mustered. I don't mean to say I
have a cure. Answers to the main questions of the
day--Where was that fourth plane headed? How did they
get knives through security?--I don't know any of
that.
I have some answers, but only to the questions nobody
is asking right now but my 5-year old. Why did all
those people die when they didn't do anything
wrong? Will it happen to me? Is this the worst thing
that's ever happened? Who were those children cheering
that they showed for just a minute, and why
were they glad? Please, will this ever, ever happen to
me?
There are so many answers, and none: It is desperately
painful to see people die without having done anything
to deserve it, and yet this is how lives end nearly
always. We get old or we don't, we get cancer,
we starve, we are battered, we get on a plane thinking
we're going home but never make it. There are
blessings and wonders and horrific bad luck and no
guarantees.
We like to pretend life is different from that, more
like a game we can actually win with the right
strategy, but it isn't. And, yes, it's the worst
thing that's happened, but only this week. Two years
ago, an earthquake in Turkey killed 17,000 people in a
day, babies and mothers and businessmen, and not
one of them did a thing to cause it. The November
before that, a hurricane hit Honduras and Nicaragua
and killed even more, buried whole villages and
erased family lines and even now, people wake up there
empty-handed.
Which end of the world shall we talk about? Sixty
years ago, Japanese airplanes bombed Navy boys who
were sleeping on ships in gentle Pacific waters.
Three and a half years later, American planes bombed a
plaza in Japan where men and women were going to work,
where schoolchildren were playing, and more humans
died at once than anyone thought possible. Seventy
thousand in a minute. Imagine. Then twice that many
more, slowly, from the inside.
There are no worst days, it seems. Ten years ago,
early on a January morning, bombs rained down from the
sky and caused great buildings in the city of
Baghdad to fall down--hotels, hospitals, palaces,
buildings with mothers and soldiers inside--and here
in the place I want to love best, I had to watch
people cheering about it. In Baghdad, survivors shook
their fists at the sky and said the word "evil." When
many lives are lost all at once, people gather
together and say words like "heinous" and "honor" and
"revenge," presuming to make this awful moment stand
apart somehow from the ways people die a little
each day from sickness or hunger. They raise up their
compatriots' lives to a sacred place--we do this, all
of us who are human--thinking our own citizens
to be more worthy of grief and less willingly risked
than lives on other soil. But broken hearts are not
mended in this ceremony, because, really, every life
that ends is utterly its own event--and also in some
way it's the same as all others, a light going out
that ached to burn longer. Even if you never had the
chance to love the light that's gone, you miss it. You
should.
You bear this world and everything that's wrong with
it by holding life still precious, each time, and
starting over. And those children dancing in the
street? That is the hardest question. We would rather
discuss trails of evidence and whom to stamp out, even
the size and shape of the cage we might put ourselves
in to stay safe, than to mention the fact that our
nation is not universally beloved; we are also
despised. And not just by "The Terrorist," that lone,
deranged non-man in a bad photograph whose opinion we
can clearly dismiss, but by ordinary people in
many lands. Even by little boys--whole towns full of
them it looked like--jumping for joy in school shoes
and pilled woolen sweaters.
There are a hundred ways to be a good citizen, and one
of them is to look finally at the things we don't want
to see. In a week of terrifying events, here is one
awful, true thing that hasn't much been mentioned:
Some people believe our country needed to learn how to hurt
in this new way. This is such a large lesson, so
hatefully, wrongfully taught, but many people before
us have learned honest truths from wrongful deaths. It
still may be within our capacity of mercy to say this
much is true: We didn't really understand how it felt
when citizens were buried alive in Turkey or Nicaragua
or Hiroshima. Or that night in Baghdad. And we
haven't cared enough for the particular brothers and
mothers taken down a limb or a life at a time, for
such a span of years that those little, briefly
jubilant boys have grown up with twisted hearts. How
could we keep raining down bombs and selling weapons,
if we had? How can our president still use that word
"attack" so casually, like a move in a checker game,
now that we have awakened to see that word in our own
newspapers, used like this: Attack on America.
Surely, the whole world grieves for us right now. And
surely it also hopes we might have learned, from the
taste of our own blood, that every war is both
won and lost, and that loss is a pure, high note of
anguish like a mother singing to any empty bed. The
mortal citizens of a planet are praying right
now that we will bear in mind, better than ever
before, that no kind of bomb ever built will
extinguish hatred.
"Will this happen to me?" is the wrong question, I'm
sad to say. It always was.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Thursday, May 21, 2009
United Nations: Global Movement Against Racism 26 March
UN 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban: Conference Review:
Sponsored by the SubCommittee for the Elimination of Racism of the NGO Committee on Human Rights in collaboration with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
K Webster, Discussant:
Thank you to the Organizers and to the Distinguished Panel:
Most of us came to Durban recognizing the desperate need to dismantle racist institutions and policies in order to end the creation of more victims and to alter the fate of those who are sinking under its weight.
We, United to End Racism, came primarily to provide a space for the activists at the conference to work on reversing the personal effects racism had left on them: The devastating, often hidden affects of racism when it becomes internalized as ones own thinking.
We listened. The stories were breathtaking and heartbreaking. And everyone who came had one to tell. Our goal was to make a safe place for these “agents of change” to unload the grief, terror and indignation at racisms legacy so they could carry on, unimpeded in their lives and their work. The ingenuity and resilience of people targeted by racism had been tested and intelligence triumphed over and over again.
There were many large success stories, but I’d like to remind us of some of the everyday stories of Durban. The ones that people told as they tried to free themselves of the hold of racisms corrosive powers; the accumulation of insults that slowly sap the life out of people.
There was the schoolteacher who had fought to end apartheid. Relishing the victory, she told of her excitement at attending an International teachers conference in Johannesburg for the fist time. But confronted by a sea of white faces, she wilted under a tidal wave of shame, embarrassment and a feeling of not belonging. She quietly packed up her bags and left. She had won the war, but the battle for her own mind was not over. And now she knew it.
Or the chance meeting with an Aboriginal leader as he stood frozen, discouraged by the lack of enthusiasm for his program. He sobbed for a full five minutes about the abduction from his people as a young boy by a white institution…and his powerlessness to stop it. He startled himself upon realizing he was feeling exactly as he had as a boy. Laughing suddenly, he raced off- to try again.
And there was the workshop run by two women: Palestinian and Israeli. They refused to accept the vilification of either ones people as the road to the resolution of the conflict. Preferring instead to painfully and awkwardly untangle the emotions that clouded their thinking.
There were countless examples of kindness and courage and patience and fortitude. People drank up the resource of the host of people who came to strategize together.
Durban was also an opportunity to address the effect on white people as the agents of racism (sometimes unwitting, sometimes willing). Absorbing its poison, being set up to play this role distorts our goodness and intelligence. It creates both monsters and a silent coterie of witnesses too frozen to act. We, too, have much damage to heal from having been coerced or bribed to barter our humanity for a counterfeit sense of “betterness”. I came from a home with good but terribly hurt people where the racism was overt and unrelenting. But I’m here now. I am very sure that white people want the chance to have our minds and hearts back. Even the most intransigent among us.
Last, as sometimes happens when people try to find a path through complex human tragedies, other forces were at work stoking confusions and fears, and encouraging the blaming of someone or group for the mess we are all in. Anti-Jewish oppression was shamefully but skillfully manipulated to target Jews and Israel and used to try to derail the intent of Durban. But it did provide a searchlight on oppressive beliefs and actions that must to be challenged if we are going to eliminate the particular destructive oppression of racism. You can’t liberate one group while targeting another.
This gathering today is a testament to the enduring belief that those forces will not win the day. That enough people will refuse to be guided by revenge or defensiveness (even when it is understandable, even when it feels “justified”) and instead will tackle the difficult task of using our minds to find our way out of this tangle.
The acts of September 11th seemed to overwhelm the large and small decisions to end racism that occurred in Durban. But eight years later, that same country elected a President named Barack Hussien Obama.
Racism is still ravaging the world. But a thousand acts of intelligence can change the trajectory of a chance meeting with a stranger, of a close friendship, of a beloved community, of a proud State, and finally, of a world.
Thank you.
Sponsored by the SubCommittee for the Elimination of Racism of the NGO Committee on Human Rights in collaboration with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
K Webster, Discussant:
Thank you to the Organizers and to the Distinguished Panel:
Most of us came to Durban recognizing the desperate need to dismantle racist institutions and policies in order to end the creation of more victims and to alter the fate of those who are sinking under its weight.
We, United to End Racism, came primarily to provide a space for the activists at the conference to work on reversing the personal effects racism had left on them: The devastating, often hidden affects of racism when it becomes internalized as ones own thinking.
We listened. The stories were breathtaking and heartbreaking. And everyone who came had one to tell. Our goal was to make a safe place for these “agents of change” to unload the grief, terror and indignation at racisms legacy so they could carry on, unimpeded in their lives and their work. The ingenuity and resilience of people targeted by racism had been tested and intelligence triumphed over and over again.
There were many large success stories, but I’d like to remind us of some of the everyday stories of Durban. The ones that people told as they tried to free themselves of the hold of racisms corrosive powers; the accumulation of insults that slowly sap the life out of people.
There was the schoolteacher who had fought to end apartheid. Relishing the victory, she told of her excitement at attending an International teachers conference in Johannesburg for the fist time. But confronted by a sea of white faces, she wilted under a tidal wave of shame, embarrassment and a feeling of not belonging. She quietly packed up her bags and left. She had won the war, but the battle for her own mind was not over. And now she knew it.
Or the chance meeting with an Aboriginal leader as he stood frozen, discouraged by the lack of enthusiasm for his program. He sobbed for a full five minutes about the abduction from his people as a young boy by a white institution…and his powerlessness to stop it. He startled himself upon realizing he was feeling exactly as he had as a boy. Laughing suddenly, he raced off- to try again.
And there was the workshop run by two women: Palestinian and Israeli. They refused to accept the vilification of either ones people as the road to the resolution of the conflict. Preferring instead to painfully and awkwardly untangle the emotions that clouded their thinking.
There were countless examples of kindness and courage and patience and fortitude. People drank up the resource of the host of people who came to strategize together.
Durban was also an opportunity to address the effect on white people as the agents of racism (sometimes unwitting, sometimes willing). Absorbing its poison, being set up to play this role distorts our goodness and intelligence. It creates both monsters and a silent coterie of witnesses too frozen to act. We, too, have much damage to heal from having been coerced or bribed to barter our humanity for a counterfeit sense of “betterness”. I came from a home with good but terribly hurt people where the racism was overt and unrelenting. But I’m here now. I am very sure that white people want the chance to have our minds and hearts back. Even the most intransigent among us.
Last, as sometimes happens when people try to find a path through complex human tragedies, other forces were at work stoking confusions and fears, and encouraging the blaming of someone or group for the mess we are all in. Anti-Jewish oppression was shamefully but skillfully manipulated to target Jews and Israel and used to try to derail the intent of Durban. But it did provide a searchlight on oppressive beliefs and actions that must to be challenged if we are going to eliminate the particular destructive oppression of racism. You can’t liberate one group while targeting another.
This gathering today is a testament to the enduring belief that those forces will not win the day. That enough people will refuse to be guided by revenge or defensiveness (even when it is understandable, even when it feels “justified”) and instead will tackle the difficult task of using our minds to find our way out of this tangle.
The acts of September 11th seemed to overwhelm the large and small decisions to end racism that occurred in Durban. But eight years later, that same country elected a President named Barack Hussien Obama.
Racism is still ravaging the world. But a thousand acts of intelligence can change the trajectory of a chance meeting with a stranger, of a close friendship, of a beloved community, of a proud State, and finally, of a world.
Thank you.
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