It was August 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke the words “I have a dream” before a national TV audience. He spoke of the ideal of a world where all people were regarded as equals and all could enjoy opportunity and personal fulfillment. His voice full of such knowing command, his words so timelessly inspiring, the dream lives and can never die!
But my dreams are very different. Not long ago, I awoke in the middle of the night with tears in my eyes, a nasty lump in my throat. In my dream I had been a witness to something, but not present in it, not an actor in what took place (in the dream). I saw from behind a man leading a woman down an almost unlit, cheerless hallway toward a barred window at the end. Both of them were slight of build. The man wore the ugly blue of a prison guard. It was the woman who drew my attention. She had dark hair that was very straight but uncombed and extended most of the way down her back. She wore a simple dark blue dress that ended midway down her slender shins. But what grasped my awareness was her unsteady gate; her walk was a semi-stumble, and with every step she seemed on the brink of a hapless swoon. The man holding her at the elbow did not seem to be a friend, and their co-ambulation was like that of a smallish bouncer at two o’clock in the morning leading a too-inebriated patron out of a nightclub.
Just as the man stopped at the barred window, his companion to his left, an unintelligible female voice could be heard on the other side of the barred window, which then seemed like some equivalent of a reception for those intending to venture through a large, dark gray metal door immediately to the right. Then, at that moment when the voice behind the barred window was addressing the man, I beheld a massive suture-incision on the back of the long-haired woman’s head that ran horizontally across a bare section at the back of the scalp. It was four inches long, and swollen. And at that instant I realized that this was no nightclub. I was in the firsthand witness of a torture victim in a North Korean political prison.
The guard-man released his grip on the wound-bearing, now-still woman’s elbow so that he could lean forward and to his right, away from her. He was apparently attending to some required action or mechanism involved in opening the metal door. And as she stood there briefly unheld, her upper body drifted leftward as if she were a small boat with an insidious hole in its hull. And a mere second later her slope steepened dramatically, and she fell over and onto a small chair, breaking her fall with her arms virtually not at all.
There was something so unforgettably grotesque about that fall! It is an image I cannot expunge from my consciousness. And all of the inexpressibly repugnant and misguided behaviors of all human history were there in it! I felt her plight so deeply! And I still feel pangs of grief at the recollection.
How can human beings treat their kind so terribly?
And I realized that I am but one mortal and powerless human being. And while my life is not nightmarish, in my waking I reside in a kind of unintentional parody, a jaded reality, an ocean of indifference and near-indifference, a zombie society, a place where I have no power to undo the nightmares of North Korea and their ilk. And others have no ken and no intention at all. My lump revisits me.
What can I do?
Decades ago, I decided to examine very carefully all my political opinions regarding the status and “right” treatment of the human individual. I came to believe that no one starts out with a moral scheme that is deliberately scripted to be cruel and oppressive. No! We start out only advocating for some betterment. We start out with only a strong feeling that life ought to be offering more hope, more prestige and recognition and opportunity, and more to be proud of. Surely life ought to hold out the hope of achieving justice! And at some point we may hear a loud and adamant voice extolling the magnificence of the nation he wishes to lead. And our needful, puerile ears swoon at the sonorous message.
But, we may ask ourselves, how does that swoon at the hearing of the Fuhrer-voice deceptively turn and morph and don the seductive mask-visage of the redeemer and avenger of right and bring forth the ghastly nightmare swoon of the torture victim?
I’ve decided that my morality must begin and end with the principle that I always uphold the dignity and integrity of the human person. I never want to look back upon my life through the wince-lens of objectivity and learn that I was on the wrong side of history… a dastard, a traitor, a participant – however small and unintentional and unknowing – in the most grievous offenses against my kind. I want never to have to confess – when all has been accounted, and the stark and final judgment of Highest Truth rendered – that I was a player in someone’s exquisitely personal Hell.
“Brother, the passwords and the plans of our city are safe with me. Never through me shall you be overcome.” (a)
(a) from the poem Conscientious Objector by Edna St. Vincent Millay