Friday Night at Eight: Journey to the Core of the Human Spirit

So in my blogging around the b’sphere, I have been battling memes.  I am a meme killer!  Woo hoo!

Latest is over the immigration issue, Spitzer, the Dems, the third rail, all that jazz.  The meme that makes me most murderous is the notion “What is it about illegal you don’t understand?”  All of a sudden seemingly liberal bloggers have become law & order Wyatt Earp’s, deciding that the rule of law is far more important than silly feel-good stuff like human rights and human rights abuses.  It appears to me that if someone has broken a law, it is then very easy to hide behind that thought even when the enforcement of that law entails violence and punishments far outweighing the crime.

But this essay is not about the immigration issue.  One of the biggest frustrations in blogging about what is called “social justice” is there are so many injustices?  Which do I choose?  New Orleans?  Burma?  Mexico?  Darfur?  Gaza?

I choose not to choose.  I choose to deny any lines between these injustices.  For they all have the same root cause.

I’d like to introduce everyone (or re-introduce if you already know her) to Helen Bamber.  She is a remarkable woman with a remarkable story.

From a New York Times review by Sara Ivy of Helen’s biography, “The Good Listener,” by Neil Belton:

Helen Bamber grew up in London during World War II in an embittered Jewish refugee family and was scarcely an adult when she traveled as a relief worker to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just after the end of the war. Struck by the physical and spiritual wreckage she witnessed among the survivors of Nazi persecution, she decided to spend her life helping to rehabilitate torture victims by listening to their stories and advocating against similar abuses.

In his first book, ”The Good Listener,” Neil Belton suggests that for Bamber this work has fulfilled a moral imperative; ignoring human rights violations means being an acomplice in such behavior. It also means invalidating the victim’s experience of suffering and hampering his ability to recover.

Belton has written a comprehensive, thoughtful biography of a woman who possesses a near compulsion to challenge the brutality that those in power sometimes inflict. He includes wrenching recent examples of torture of political prisoners in Chile, South Africa and Israel. He proposes that systematic mental and physical abuses are neither impulsive nor merely sadistic; in this century, torture has become a ”bureaucratic industry’…

I read this book years ago and have recently thought again of Helen Bamber.  She was a complex person, did not consider herself a “good” person.  Her father read Mein Kampf to her when she was little, he was a fearful and bitter man.  Her mother compensated by being overly frivolous and indulgent in socializing.

From a 1999 News Hour interview with Jim Lehrer:

HELEN BAMBER: The medical foundation was established at the end of 1985, and the purpose of the organization was to offer a comprehensive, holistic service to people who live in the UK and who suffered torture. We have seen over 16 — I think it’s now about 17,500 people since we started. We saw, last year, just under 3,000 new people. Torture’s a very complex issue. It affects not only somebody’s body that’s been assaulted, and maybe even mutilated or injured, it’s about the effect on the family and on the children. And so we began to develop services that were what we felt to be appropriate for people whose cultures were different, whose belief systems were different, whose views of healing were different than perhaps our own, so that listening to them, understanding what mattered to them, became very important indeed, so that we entered a learning situation as much as, what, a caring or giving situation.

…

CHARLES KRAUSE: Why is it, do you think, that countries which are considered civilized countries– countries like Chile, countries like Argentina, countries like Israel, where you have, in fact, been and testified about the use of torture– why do they continue to use torture as a method against their own people?

HELEN BAMBER: It’s a very good question, and it’s a very difficult one to answer. It’s,

I suppose for some, an effective way of maintaining political power. I think it’s fearful governments, governments who want to eliminate an enemy and control the population. And by torturing some of the main opponents, it’s an example to others of what might happen to them. I don’t think it ever really works. You never get the names that you want. You never get total political control. There will always be a movement for change. There will always be people who will surmount it. But it’s a devastating practice, and it is unbelievable that it continues in over 90 countries today. I wish I had the answer.

CHARLES KRAUSE: In this book, one of the questions that Neil Belton asks again and again is why someone dedicates their life to good, to doing good, to trying to help the victims of torture, as you have done. Why have you spent your life at this work, doing this sort of thing?

HELEN BAMBER: I don’t feel I’m necessarily doing good. I think that I’m using skills, and my colleagues are using skills, to help people overcome some very terrible things that have happened to them, to find a way to live again. I don’t think of myself as doing good, really, but what can I say? I was influenced as a child to abhor violence and cruelty. I lived with the fear of it for many years as a child growing up in London, where fascists were strong, or seemed to me to be very strong, where they were marching through the streets of London, where fascism was growing in Europe. And I suppose in a way, I’ve always been dealing with my own fears. We could put it like that, that I’ve been trying to overcome my fear and my wish to see change. I believe that we can make change, but it’s so difficult, but that’s what I’m working for. I want more understanding of why we carry violence within us that, given certain opportunities, spurts out into cruelty. And we’re not good at that. We’ve conquered so much in the 20th century in terms of medicine and science, but we’ve learned relatively little about ourselves and we are very cruel beasts. But we have — we have other things as well.

In a keynote speech Bamber gave on the topic “Building Communities,” she tried to explain the nexus between helping victims of torture and community:

I have found the title of the conference, “Building Communities”, a little daunting, but it has given me the scope to reflect on various episodes in my working life in which the investment in community began to represent more than a sensible social endeavour, but rather a means of creative survival for the individuals it involves.

…

To return to Belsen, if I may, my unit established a hospital in Belsen to enable people to try to find their loved ones, and a theatre where people might perform what was impossible for them to say. With the help of the American humanitarian agency, workshops were set up in Belsen and other camps. Communities within the camps, especially in Belsen, took form and developed.

What did we learn from this experience? First, of course, is that helping to develop a community post-war in a situation of continuing violence and chaos, in which the question of integration into a larger community or a host community has no place, is fraught with difficulty and hostility. Our role as carers and providers took on the additional role of advocacy, a role that could in certain situations create tensions amongst ourselves.

Helen Bamber was not trained as a therapist.  She was, however, consumed with the determination to face her fears, fears her father inculcated in her when she was a child by teaching her very early about how terrible human beings can be to each other.

And she was not a cuddly do-gooder, either.  She herself said she rarely cried when listening to victims of torture tell her story.  She held them, rocked them, but most of all, she listened.

Bamber believes:

… the world is divided into two types, bystanders who see only what they want, and proper witnesses who observe and record the truth.

She has worked with victims of torture from the concentration camps of Germany to the Gaza, in Latin America, all around the world.  She is a proper witness.

Torture.  When does mistreatment become torture?  To me, one of the definitions has to be making a human being feel utterly powerless, that anything can be done to them and there is no recourse, no defense they can bring to the situation.  In America one of the most profound laws we have is that we are entitled to defense, that we are innocent until proven guilty.  That applies to anyone on our soil, not just American citizens.

But that is not what has happened.  Instead we have the least powerful among us, the most vulnerable, being tortured in so many ways that the word itself becomes meaningless and I have to switch to saying these actions are human rights abuses.

In New Orleans, the “annnual suicide rate  has increased from nine per 100,000 before the storm to more than 26 per 100,000 after Katrina.”

In New Orleans those who lived in public housing were forced to evacuate, to lose their homes — homes that sometimes held generations of their families, neighbors, their homes, and were not allowed to return and still are not allowed to return.  The folks in New Orleans have suffered and yet we hear so much cruelty, people saying they are fools to live there, that poor folks are at fault for their poverty, that no one owes anyone a home, cruel things, and the media reports those things.

And to the East, after a horrific and brutal raid in New Bedford, Massachusetts:

WASHINGTON — Eleven members of the New Bedford families who were separated from their relatives after the March raid on a leathergoods factory came to the nation’s capital yesterday to urge the government to stop cracking down on suspected illegal immigrant workers.

Among them were Lixiere and Yessica , a New Bedford couple originally from El Salvador, and their 2-year-old son, Jefferson. Both parents, who worked as machine operators at the factory, said they spent a week in detention after the raid. Meanwhile, their child was cared for by his uncle and was traumatized by the abrupt separation.

“In those days he did not want to eat,” said Lixiere, who declined to give their last name because of their ongoing immigration case. “He only asked for us. He lost three pounds.”

Now reunited, the trio drove to Washington with eight other New Bedford immigrants in a trip organized by the Boston-based Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, or MIRA. They took part in a mock hearing about the impact of immigration raids on families, urging a moratorium on such crackdowns before a panel of social activism leaders.

The mock hearing was held on a day in which the White House and Senate leaders announced an accord on legislation that would allow many undocumented workers to stay legally in the country.

Lixiere told his story alongside a Cape Verdean woman who said her first name was Sandra. After the New Bedford raid, she said, she was flown to a detention center in Texas and was separated from her 15-month-old daughter for 10 days.

The panel also heard from Amaro Laria , a Harvard Medical School professor who specializes in the psychiatric treatment of Latinos. Laria told the panel of treating several New Bedford immigrant children for severe anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress.

Immigrant -rights activists argued that the government was responsible for the children’s distress.

“We want the government to stop the raids because families are being torn apart every day,” said Carlos Saavedra , a MIRA Coalition organizer. “We need to reform the immigration system and stop treating people like scapegoats. These families weren’t selling drugs or doing anything bad. They were just working — and being exploited at their jobs, too.”

Separating parents from children.  There will be a price those children and those parents will pay that has nothing to do with “the law.”

Yet is there sympathy even in the face of this terrible reality?  Let’s look at the ICE’s response:

But Marc Raimondi , press secretary for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security, said the agency is just doing its job by enforcing the law.

“If a parent fails to pay a mortgage and the house is foreclosed upon, that action is going to affect the child, but that doesn’t mean banks should stop collecting mortgages,” Raimondi said. “The same thing goes for law enforcement. The responsibility lies upon the family member who is violating the law, not the government for enforcing the law.”

What is it about “illegal that you don’t you understand?”

Some people have power.  They mistake power for the law.  They use that power against those who have none.  There are consequences to that act.

There are witnesses to that act.  There are folks who will be “proper witnesses who observe and record the truth. ”  They see into the core of the human spirit without sentimentality or tears but with great anger and understanding and compassion.  They see those who hide behind the word “LAW” while they torture and oppress and commit injustices against the human spirit.

And that’s why there is no one story.  New Orleans.  Darfur.  Burma.  Undocumented migrants.  Iraqi citizens.  Prisoners of war.  Jews in Nazi Germany.  Palestinians in Gaza.  It is all one story about the human spirit.  You can see only what you want, be a bystander.  Or you can be a proper witness and observe and record the truth.

To me, that is social justice.  It is all about humanity, and borders and laws have nothing to do with that.

And one last irony.  From a London book review of Bamber’s biography:

She was born in London in 1925. Her paternal grandparents, who may have been illegal immigrants, had come to England 30 years before, after wanderings from Poland to America and back.