Day 54
witness
Witness is a word that we easily associate with violence. Most used to describe the person who sees a crime perpetrated and whose experience is used to identify the perpetrator. To witness a crime, however, is also to witness the victim, to experience a human being in deep pain or at the time of their death. To witness a crime, is also to witness hatred, pain, fear or serious mental illness in action. To bear witness to the words that are posted on social media is often to bear witness to language that reveals rage without compassionate, thoughtful engagement. Compassionate and informed thought takes time and patience and education and self-awareness.
In so many areas of our lives I am witnessing our collective and individual vision narrow. We decide who to follow, what to read, what to share and how to engage it. There is a constant rapid editing and splicing and a thousand judgement calls about what and how much we take in, judgement calls made second by second, that dictate our experience. We feel that we are witnessing the world in so much more detail, yet we are seeing the broad strokes and losing the individual lives and experiences that demand nuanced, careful seeing.
If we are to truly bear witness to the ugly truth that is laid bare in acts of violence against the vulnerable, we have to experience more than just the aspect of violence that enrages us. We have to bear witness to the pain and corruption that turns a cop into an offender, that makes an idealistic boy a soldier, that makes a young man an indiscriminate shooter. We have to witness the ideologies and ways of thinking that we all participate in and that create people of violence. Ideologies that insist on turning some of us into some of them and some of them into enemies and enemies into people who we can only imagine dead. We have to witness the tools of violence, the guns, bombs and words, that kill, or that turn people in pain into people of violence. We have to witness the relationships between fear and despair, pain and grief, violence and isolation.
We live in an unjust world where power, as ever, is in the hands of the few. These powerful individuals and the institutions that they inhabit are systematically hurting the poorest and most vulnerable human beings, not to mention our precious environment. This is not news, it is reality, and it must be witnessed. Justice depends on the testimonies of credible witnesses who are willing to see the whole event, the entire reality. We can not be credible witnesses if we are seeing through the filters of self-righteousness and fundamentalism (a phenomenon that is not just restricted to the religious fanatics and right-wing conservatives.)
We cannot be credible witnesses if we are experiencing our world only through hashtags and filters; if we are limiting our experiences to social media and news feeds and not expanding it to the physical reality that our bodies inhabit. Our physical reality is where we are most likely to consciously and unconsciously contribute to the problems; what we consume, how we interact with each other, the work we choose, etc.
We cannot be credible witnesses if we bypass the beauty of this world and of human beings because we are afraid that it will distract us from the real issues rather than deepen our understanding, compassion and energy to work for justice.
We cannot be credible witnesses if we fixate on one aspect of the atrocity. We must be brave enough and vulnerable enough and patient enough to bear witness to ALL the pain and fear and mis-guided intentions, while also witnessing the many beautiful acts of mercy, kindness, compassion and justice that happen every day.
If we witness and testify to all that is; then even as we are condemning the perpetrators, we can be taking responsibility for our complacency and complicity. We can not only condemn the man or women who commits the single act of violence, but also the institution that empowers them, and the system that supports the institution. But to do this effectively we must have clear vision and open hearts, we must allow grief to accompany our rage, we must allow a healthy sense of mercy to accompany our intense desire for justice—so that we do not burn the whole world down in our fury.
