No resolution of conflict is possible
without the willingness to let go of the past. Another way of saying this is
that someone has to say "enough" and mean it. Or, as Harry Truman
said, "The buck stops here."
I saw two movies in the last two days
that reminded me that the word "enough" begins to create a future distinct
from the past. "Enough" draws a line in the sand that demarcates who
we were from who we will be.
The first movie that reminded me of
this is called, "War Witch" and is the fictionalized story of an unnamed
African country where children are abducted and trained to be killers. In the
movie, the main character, a girl who is 12 at the beginning of the movie, is
forced to kill her parents, then later her husband and, still later, is raped
and has the baby of one of the rebel leaders. It's a story we've read about in
the newspapers and will continue to read about until enough of us say enough.
The second movie is called "The
Gatekeepers" and is a documentary in which six former heads of the Israeli
security forces (called Shin Bet) tell the history of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict after the so called Six Day War in 1967 in which Israel annexed the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip after defeating the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian
armies.
This violence will never end until
someone says, "enough" and means it. As one of the former Shin Bet
leaders says, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."
Similarly, I was attending a fund
raising breakfast for a group in Phoenix that mentors at risk children. At the
breakfast, several of the children spoke, as did a father whose son was being
mentored and who had attended parenting classes.
The father was a big, broad shouldered
man who dwarfed the lectern behind which he stood.
The man started crying from the moment
he began speaking and was barely able to finish his talk. He spoke about how he
had abused his children before attending the program, had stopped as a result
of the program and was committed to a very different life for his family. In
other words, he had learned to say, "enough."
He also talked about how his father had
beat him. I imagined that his father's father's father's father had also been
an abuser and the abuse would have continued into the next generations were it
not for the man behind the microphone who had learned to say
"enough."
And that's what it takes for our world
to change. Enough people have to say enough. Enough to violence. Enough to
conflict. Enough to being right and righteous about being right.
Our conflicts can end now. We just have
to say "enough. It stops with me."
