Turning Toward Torture

Torture is in the news these days, again, and I'm glad of it. There was the Newsweek Koran-pissing news, and then the Amnesty International gulag news, and then the news that some members of Congress think maybe it's their job to debate the issue after all. These things make me hopeful, and I begin to hope that perhaps we can change things, that we can peaceably turn from what we have become in these terrible few years. I do not say, "turn from the path we are on, before it is too late" because it is already too late. What we do today will not make up for what we have done in the past. To see what's been done in our names, to abhor it, does not absolve us of our responsibility for it. But it does make it possible for us to do something different right now, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. In that sense, it will never be too late.

So part of me is hopeful. But another part of me worries that, as we have before, as we did last year when the Abu Ghraib photos were released, as we did when the Gonzales hearings were going on -- that we are simply taking a peek at torture, and that we will soon, once again, slam the door on it, cover our eyes from the sight of it, and go on as before, hoping against hope that we did not see what we saw, and do not know what we know, and are not responsible.

I worry about this because it has been a year now since Abu Ghraib, and little has changed. The revelations keep coming, and yet little has changed. Most Americans still, as the Times reported last Sunday (see my previous post), "want it blurry."

For a year now I've been torture girl, screaming and nagging and begging people I know and love, not just 'those other people out there, in the Red States', to look at the torture. And yet so many people will not. And I've wondered in desperation how to get people to see, why won't people see, why won't they pay attention? And the more I shouted and jumped up and down, the more people did not pay attention, and the more alone I've felt, and I've been filled with the frustration of seeing what others won't see. And I've been so angry. I've bee so angry at all of you, and you know who you are -- for covering your eyes.

But my anger and my agitation and my arm-waving hasn't gotten me anywhere. So, you who cover your eyes -- have you read this far, even? will you read this far? -- this is what I would like to say to you:

You ask me what good it will do to turn our eyes to the torture. Tell me what to do, you say, and I will do it, but don't ask me to look at something and feel helpless in its face. And I say, if you will not look at a thing, how can you begin to know what you can do to fix it? You stand in a different place than I do -- what good will it do for me to tell you what I must do about torture? What you must do, what you would see you must do, if you looked, if you saw it as it is, not out of the corner of your eye, but straight on, will surely be different.

Tell me it can be fixed before I look at it, you say to me, and I say to you that no such promise can be made. But if we cannot fix it, if we cannot make our government stop, then we must learn to live with it, and how can we do that unless we see it for what it is? Do you not have the sense, some part of each day, that there's something enormous that you're avoiding? Like that pile of bills on your desk, some of which are no doubt overdue. But you don't pay the bills, and you don't even open them, and you don't even look at them, and instead you think about easier things. And yet the bills are there, a hole of discomfort, a gravitational force that pulls at your mind. As long as those bills sit unopened, parts of you are sloughing off and drifting toward them.

Such is the power of unpaid bills, so imagine the great black hole that is torture. My friends who will not look, do not imagine that you thereby protect yourselves from the terrible force of this fact. Your fear grows and grows. You are afraid, and you feel guilty and ashamed that you are afraid, and all of these feelings are awful, and you hope, by not looking, that you will not have to feel them so much.

Feel your fear, friends -- it's a fearsome thing. Feel guilt and shame too. I certainly do. But do not let those feelings keep you from turning toward torture. Only by turning toward it can we hope to stop it. And if we cannot stop it, then, if we see it together, we can comfort one another. We can share the burden of seeing together. Surely that is better than staying locked, each in our own private horror. If we cannot stop the torture, then let us cry for it together. Let us beat our breasts and tear our hair together, in our guilt and shame and helplessness and fear and our despair. Let us witness, and witness honestly, and not convince ourselves that if we do not look that it does not affect our humanity.


In this moment, while torture again is in the news, we have the opportunity to pay attention, and to ask one another to pay attention to it.


I beg you to see, in this moment, and the next, and the next, and the next after that.. If we cannot help one another to do this, then there will be no end to our shame.