We Need Story and Direct Action
Make the story come off the page!

A reflection given by Susan Crane for Witness Against Torture and Jonah House at the TASSC 24 Hour Vigil, June 28, 2008

I see on the schedule that we'll be hearing stories today….thank you for your courage in coming and sharing your stories with us. I want to start with reading a poem by Leslie Marmon Silko, a well known Pueble Native American writer.

I will tell you something about stories
They aren't just entertainment.
Don't be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
All we have to fight off disaster, disease, and devastation
We don't have anything
if we don't have stories.
Their evil is mighty
But it can't stand up to our stories,
So they try to destroy the stories or
Let the stories be confused or forgotten.
They would like that
They would be happy
Because then we would be defenseless...

Three years ago, now, 25 of us—mostly catholic workers-- were walking in Cuba, walking to Guantanamo, in an attempt to focus attention on torture, the abrogation of Geneva conventions and violation of international law, indefinite detention, insults to Islam, and a betrayal of the dignity of the human person – our brothers who were being held there at Guantanamo, and at other secret prisons.,

We started our walk each day reading the story of one of the prisoners. Then we walked in silence for a while, so we could reflect on what we had heard. We had a chance, in the silence, to realize our shared humanity, to understand that we are one with each prisoner.

In preparation for going to Cuba, as we met, we heard the stories of people imprisoned there.. As we returned, we continued to read the stories.. on the web, on video, in real life. These stories help us understand that the men in Guantanamo are just like us: parents, sons, teachers, taxi drivers, farmers, people driven by their conscience, people who listen to their God for guidance. People who are motivated by compassion.

At the time that we walked to Guantanamo , the silence around the torture that the US was doing in Abu Graib and Guantanamo was deafening. We felt it was necessary to make a statement so loud that people in other countries would know that many North Americans said NO to torture.

And since then, Witness against Torture has organized discussions, street theater and marches, civil resistance, trials—and support for those of us who ended up in jail. Our hope is to pressure the next president during the first 100 days so that Guantanamo is closed and the practices of torture and cruelity are ended.

Two years ago, on the 5th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo to prisoners from this current war of aggression, some of us walked to the US District court in orange suits, and others went inside the court, and when the walkers arrived, those inside put on our orange shirts, and gathered in the Atrium of the courthouse to occupy the space and to pray for the US to repent of its policies of torture.

The next year, this past Jan 11, 80 of us were arrested as we knelt on the supreme court steps, or as we occupied the Grand Hall inside the supreme court. We were holding banners appealing to the justices to close the prison, restore habeas corpus, and obey international law.

We went to the federal court, and the supreme court without ID's, without drivers licenses or passports. Each of us had a prisoner name, a prisoner story. A prisoner with whom we were walking, whose story had become, if not our story, at least part of our own life. In each of our actions we sought to take our prisoner's story off the page and let it inform our lives, let it engender rage at injustice, and love of compassion. The prisoner I carried in my heart was Sami al-Hajj.

A catholic theologian, Megan McKenna, talks about the value and necessity of story. Referring to gospel stories, Megan suggests that all stories are true and some of them actually happened. God is a mystery. The gospel stories are layered we and we see God as we find the layers of the stories. . Stories tell us who we are in relation to God, to one another, to all our relations. We get the idea that– all of earth – is groaning, awaiting for us to understand these stories, make them part of our lives, and act on them.

. Our stories tell us what our values are; what our long term dreams are; what our major weaknesses and lacks are. They say: “This is what we are known by.” We are known not just by the company we keep - the campaneros/campaneras with whom we break bread - but also by the stories we tell. If the story hasn't become part of us, part of our flesh, we didn't hear it. The story begins when the teller stops talking.

Hearing the stories of the prisoners at Guantanamo moved our hearts, hearing the stories gave compassion a chance to grow. Hearing the stories helped the holy spirit come into our hearts. And today, I am so thankful that you are all here and that you are sharing your stories with us.

I think that, particularly for those of us who haven't experienced torture, there's a responsibility to publicly speak out against torture, and against war and domination in all its guises.

And what does that “speaking out” look like? When I look at the crimes our government is party to, I know that it's not enough to speak out at the ballot box or sign a petition, or lobby congress people.. I know it's not enough to get out on the street and carry a banner. It's not enough to go to the Pentagon and hold a sign for peace. That kind of dissent is allowed - it is used to prove that we are, indeed, a democracy, with first amendment freedoms. I believe that this legal speaking out is necessary, but it's not enough. And if fact, if it's all that we do, it's false opposition in that it doesn't challenge the structures of domination.

What does real opposition to torture, to war after war, to the world in which everything is commodified, to the subjugation of the human spirit underneath one hierarchy or another look like? I think real opposition is international —as you are today. It is outside the rules of the countries, and in fact, stands against the rules and laws.

In my opinion, I have to plan and participate in actions that are outside the allowable dissent: actions that are not allowable, that risk arrest and jail; that risk our jobs, our good names, our status in the community, that risk the interruption of our five year plans, our retirement plans, our readiness to be masters of our own lives.

We have to get as serious about our resistance to war and torture, as our friends, our sons and daughters are about war. Theirs is a total commitment. And mine must be the same.

We have to take time in prayer, and look at when God is calling us to resist the empire under which we live. There are a hundred ways for dissent to be on the side of power: and there are even more ways for dissent to be on the side of poor, on the side of those who have been tortured, on the side of those marginalized.

I want to thank the people here who came to tell their stories. At Witness against Torture, some folks have been signing their emails, Next year, in Bagram. But I rather say, to those of us who come as supporters to the torture survivors, next year, in federal prison.