"These Are No Ordinary Times".
It is a one of our cherished freedoms to gather and to speak freely in this country about the issues that concern us.
And it is our duty as citizens to raise our voices in dissent when government violates our Constitutional rights and the principles
of International Law.
We must assert these rights to free speech and assembly, as we do here tonight, and as the Asheville Chapter of
Veterans for Peace does each Tuesday, and Women in Black each Friday, standing in downtown Asheville.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Letters and Papers from Prison, wrote of the incomparable value in seeing “the great evils of world
history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed,
the reviled—in short from the perspective of those who suffer."
But the challenge, always, has been how to hold on to hope, while not hiding from the difficult truths of the day.
Rev. Nelson Johnson of the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, N.C., is a veteran of the civil rights movement, and of the
terrorism of the KKK. He spoke at Warren Wilson College last week, and cautioned “These are no ordinary times." How hard it is, he
said, “to get through the layers and layers of deception and confusion” to truth and reconciliation.
We live now in a political climate where dissent is criminalized and deception is commonplace. Our civil liberties, and indeed
the very founding principles of our Constitution, are subverted from the highest offices of this government. Yet the stories of
ordinary people who act bravely in extraordinary circumstances have power to inform our own understanding, to deepen and widen our
compassion, and help us to catch the courage to act for justice.
Kathy Kelly’s (2005) book Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison, tells of her work with Voices in the Wilderness,
a group organized to challenge the genocidal U.N. sanctions against Iraq.
On seventy delegations, beginning in 1995, they brought medical supplies to the hospitals, and came back with “the images and stories of
ordinary Iraqis, most of them children, bearing the brunt of punishment.”
“At a deep emotional level,” Kelly writes, “I never wanted to be a spectator, a bystander, sitting on my hands or standing on the sidelines
in the face of unspeakable evil.”
Kelly stayed on in Iraq through the U.S.bombings in 2003.“Where you stand determines what you see,” she wrote about her time in
Iraq “huddled over candles … while gut-wrenching explosions continued late into the night.” Later, from a cell in Pekin Federal Prison, where
she spent three months for protest against the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, Kelly wrote, “We tried hard to inform people that hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi children died as a direct result of economic sanctions. But it was as though we were part of a defective
Jeopardy quiz game. We had the answers to questions that would never be asked.”
Our mainstream media, the traditional watchdog of democracy, has failed us, and funding cuts to our public libraries and schools
threaten further our need to know. Yet despite this, many important books still reach our hands, through Independent book stores
like Malaprops, and on the shelves of Pack Memorial Library. The truth has a way of breaking through the lies.
Iraqi novelist and activist Haifa Zangana,a political prisoner during Saddaam Hussein's regime, said, “Storytelling is an act
of liberation, a form of rebellion and revolt against authority, fear and powerlessness.
A 25-year old Iraqi woman, known only as Riverbend, has reclaimed her power. In 2005, selections from her web log were
published as Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (Feminist Press May 2005).
Riverbend writes in a June 21, 2005 , entry: “We’re hearing about raids in many areas in the Karkh half of Baghdad in particular. On the
television they talk about ‘terrorists’ being arrested, but there are dozens of people being rounded up for no particular reason.
Almost every Iraqi family can give the name of a friend or relative who is in one of the many American prisons...
They aren’t allowed to see lawyers or have visitors and stories of torture have become commonplace.”
Here at home, more evidence comes to light of abuse and torture of prisoners held in U.S.custody—from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay,
to the 2.2 million incarcerated in county jails, State and Federal prisons and INS detention centers throughout this country.
The human rights abuses are more than just the actions of “a few bad apples.”
Professor Angela Davis,herself a political prisoner, raises important questions in her books, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003),
and Abolition Democracy: Prisons, Democracy, and Empire,(2005). She explores connections between the Jim Crow
era of terror in the South and the horrors of America’s prisons.
Hundreds of nonviolent dissenters are serving long prison terms in recent years. And we are coming out with our stories.
My book Conscience & Consequence: A Prison Memoir is based on my experiences in Alderson Federal Prison Camp.
Linda Mashburn of Brevard, NC, along with 32 other human rights activists, is now awaiting the order to report from the Bureau of Prisons for her peaceful
protest against the notorious School of the Americas
Leslie Gill, author of The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas,
asserts that “two of the enduring legacies of the SOA, and two of the most important things that it tells us now in the post-Abu Ghraib context
is that torture is not new to the US military, and that impunity has been an aspect of US policy in the Americas and elsewhere for a very long time.”
Sister Dianna Ortiz, an American Ursuline nun, can attest to that. In 1989 she was in Guatemala, teaching Mayan children to read,
when she was abducted by U.S.funded, trained and equipped security forces and taken to a secret torture center in the capital city.
Her (2002)book, The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth reveals that her torturers were part
of the Guatemalan death squads under the authority of SOA graduate General Hector Gramajo.
“I don’t have the right to remain silent,” Ortiz writes. “As long as I am alive, I have to use my life to work against the practice
of torture.”
Rev. Joyce Hollyday, co-pastor of Circle of Mercy in Asheville, in her book, On the Heels of Freedom,tells the stories of people
of The American Missionary Association who founded the schools that educated former slaves in the post-Civil War South. She writes of their courage
“to name unjust issues,” their compassion "toward people perishing on the margins of society, and their commitment to empowerment.
She writes: “The times summon us to claim the liberating power of education and faith, the moral force of justice; to draw inspiration and strength
from the stories of those who went before us, showing a way where there seemed to be no way.”
Sarah Pirtle, in a song dedicated to a Palestinian youth, sings:
“Give me the heart to hold your story;
I will carry you where I go.
We are powerful as mountains.
We havemore power than we know.”
Remarks at Author's Event, with CSpan2 Book TV, at Pack Memorial Library, Asheville, N.C. Feb. 28, 2006. Copyright Clare Hanrahan
