Dear Mister President

Do you ever wonder what you can do in one lifetime? 

John Calvi, a Quaker healer, once said it will take at least two generations of people working socially and systemically to end torture in our world.

If we consider torture as the destination of this long journey of human evolution, we may find it makes sense in our minds.  But, it feels wrong.  Knowing about it feels so wrong to us that it exists in each of us as a tiny disease that grows in the form of disappointment and pain.  I wish sometimes that I could go back to not knowing that the United States has tried to get a confession from a male prisoner by taking his child down the hall and breaking his arm to encourage the prisoner to confess.  There are countless other stories, but this one makes me think of my own husband and sons.  

The road leading to the place in which we are now standing, has been longer than we can see in any direction.   The road leading from here into the future splits into in an infinite number of directions and is longer than I have ever considered long to be.   Just by visualizing a world without torture, one of those many paths becomes clearer.  This is hope. 

This is my sense when I allow the knowing to come.  Sometimes I think the knowing is a spiritual experience that can only be described in poetry, because it is hardly meant for words.  Other times I don’t think and I feel the knowing is as mundane as eating, seeing, and breathing.  My body feels this knowing in the turning of the Earth, the beating of my heart, and in the expansiveness of the universe.  For example, I see the stars through the city lights, or through a haze of atmosphere, and they are obscured by my mind’s inability to feel the infinite.   But, I know it is there.  I have seen it before.   Now I know.  I can’t always see it, but there is always someone who does.  This is a good thing.  In all generations, there have been people who know what feels right and what feels wrong. 

I still get overwhelmed by the visions of beauty and change that I have.  It almost feels irreverent to speak out when they are given to me.  However, I don’t think I am special in these moments.  I think we are all bringing this knowing.  We gather together in our existence and like magnetism or gravity, it pulls otherwise random senses into a whole for a blink in time.  Someone inevitably articulates the knowing in the way it came to them in that blink of a moment, so often obscured by intelligence and activity.   Like knowing that torture is wrong.   Knowing something is wrong, is knowing what love is.   It is the beginning of a grand paradigm change. 

One truth pokes through the dome of the heavens and then all we can see is that there is something beyond the dome.  It is like the well-known drawing of an old woman who is at the same time a young maid.  It is like Plato’s allegory of the cave, where an individual who only knew the shadows on the wall and who becomes transformed by the reality.  That the outside world is three dimensional and completely different from what he has experienced up until that moment.  He can never go back to not knowing.  

So, here we are. 

Just think about torture for a minute.  It’s simpler than it seems.  It feels good to be held with gentle hands by our mothers and fathers.  It hurts all over when they throw us down upon the hard floor and walk away because we were not what they expected us to be.  Somewhere in the world today, at this moment, someone is feeling that kind of pain.  Someone is doing it and someone is letting it happen and still others are letting that person let it happen over and over again.  It’s torture.  It’s political.  It is a system.  It is a cycle.  And it is like a large rock the size of the moon rolling down hill.  It feels like the best we can do is to step out of the way and wait for it to stop.   After it stops, the healing will begin.  It will take a long time to heal from torture.  The healing process will take generations.  It is like a cool, clear aquifer deep under the earth.  It has taken hundreds of years for the water to filter down through air, trees, grass, animals, people, soil, silt, gravel, clay, and rock to become a pure element.  Healing from this kind of pain will take that long.  Someday, when children grow up knowing that the human body is as sacred as our soul and that we are all one, the world will know an end to torture. 

Let’s try to stop the rock.  Let’s change the hill, shrink the mass, or become bigger than both.  Stop torturing political prisoners, stop torturing inmates, stop torturing ourselves, and stop torturing our enemies.  Stop working hard every day and giving money to the powerful and afraid and tell everyone you know that torture is wrong.  Tell them that it hurts.  Tell them that you don’t want your child to be tortured some day.  Tell them that no one deserves to feel that kind of pain.  We are all feeling it right now. 

Choose a vision of love.  Pick up the children of humanity and hold them gently in our arms like a mother or a father.  Forgive them for not being as you had expected them to be.  And change the future.   

Learn More:  Karen Tse: How To Stop Torture, Council On Foreign Relations, Something Extraordinary, OM Chant