Families Going Through Trauma 

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel

 Adolfo Pérez Esquivel was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980 for his nonviolent advocacy of human rights in Argentina. A professor of architecture he became the general secretary of a Christian-based human rights organization called Service and Peace. He suffered arrest and restrictions during his courageous advocacy for human rights. He can speak from personal experience of family trauma in a climate of human rights abuses.

I want to thank you for this opportunity to share with you, thank you in particular to the representatives of the Community of Christ, National Conference for Community and Justice, and Rockhurst University and the honorary doctorate degree bestowed on me this evening.  I want to thank PeaceJam for all of the work that they have been doing on behalf of young people. PeaceJam is growing in many countries throughout the world.

For me it is a special honor to be here in this Temple. I learned this afternoon that President Truman in the nearby auditorium talked about the beginning of the United Nations in his first public meeting after signing the U.N. Charter a day or so earlier in San Francisco back in 1946. I think this is a very special moment to be together at such a time of great crisis throughout our world. We need to strengthen the U.N. It is a place where nations can come together and build greater understanding and a greater community of nations for peace everywhere. In a world of great conflict, many wars, tremendous social conflict, a world of great poverty of hunger, what can we do? This afternoon I was reading a great writer, Erich Fromm, who in his book the Fear of Freedom, said that in life there are two games we can play, we can either be part of the team for hope or we can be part of the team that plays out of fear. We have to choose. The game of fear in a sense is a way in which we become enclosed amongst ourselves and out of fear are not able to reach out and to really enjoy life. And this choice of hope is a choice in which we are enabled to use our creativity on behalf of a better future for everyone. I was also reminded of an ancient proverb that says the darkest hour is the hour just before dawn. We have to bet on that dawn, on that awakening for ourselves, for our families and for the entire world. But we have to be very clear, that no one can offer us something that do not have ourselves. If we do not have peace in our own hearts and in our own minds than we will not be able to offer peace to anyone. Peace is not something we can give away it is something that has to be won, has to be worked for. And in order to do this we really need to search for and find the true meaning of freedom, of liberty. Because if we are not free and do not live in liberty, we will not be able to love.

I have been asked to address the issue of family particularly of families living in situations of great trauma. What happens with our families in trauma? The family is the basis of society, the cell on which society is built. We cannot have families without society and neither can we have society without strong families. Each one of us is a human being that forms a part of society and as part of society we are impacted by what happens in society. We are touched by the good things that happen, and we are also touched by the bad things that happen. So we need to ask ourselves how we can work to overcome the situations of violence and conflicts that exist in our societies. How can we work to move beyond these problems? We have just seen in the very powerful ballet dance before I spoke, images that come from my country, Argentina, images of the resistance of the mothers who came together in the face of the repression and the trauma by the military dictatorship at that time in my country. Families that were punished by the repression, by the assassination of their children, by the disappearance of loved ones. But this is not something that happened just in Argentina. It is something that is going on throughout Latin America. I think this means that we have to open the possibilities of dialogue and understanding within our families and in our societies.  And we need to know that dialogue and understanding is the only path to peace.

I want to remember in particular something that happened here in the USA, something that had an enormous impact all over the world, the terrorist attack that happened on September 11, 2001. At that time I was in Brazil for the launching of the world social forum. At the same time those terrorist attacks were happening here in the United States, there was also other news, very important news, that didn’t reach any of the papers, or television. Our media just did not cover it. It was information that was released by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. That news indicated that on September 11 and everyday, 35,000 children die of hunger around the world. What do we call that? What kind of world can we imagine if there is such inequality, if there is such a stark contrast between those that have and those who do not have? What kind of world exists? What happens with countries that suffer wars, what happens to countries like ours throughout all Latin America, which lived under military dictatorships? This is why I think we have to always work to keep as our starting point, humanity, human beings, real men and women, young people, old people who are demanding their right to be, to have a dignified place in our world.  They call out to all of us each demanding a dignified place in the world for everyone.

I want to ask you something. Do you like stories? I want to tell you a story that comes from a great Latin American author, a Columbian and a Nobel Laureate in literature, García Márquez.  Perhaps this little story maybe useful to help you understand what I want to share with you in this address.

A young child, a little 8 year old, went into his dad’s study one day. His dad is a scientist and was doing some studying and some investigating and some research trying to resolve the scientific problems of the world. The child said, “Dad I want to help you.” The dad said, “No, I am very, very busy. Why don’t you leave me alone so I can do my very important work and you go play.” The child says, “No, Dad I want to help you.” The dad is very concerned and doesn’t know what to do with the kid. Then he sees a magazine and sees that there is a picture of the world in it, so he grabs his scissors and cuts out the picture and then begins to cut the picture up into little pieces and makes a jigsaw puzzle. He finds some scotch tape and sits the kid down at a little table and puts all the pieces out and said, “Now son, why don’t you help me put the world back together again.” The child looks at all the pieces and wonders what to do. He is just a little 8 year old and doesn’t know what the world looks like. Sometimes even as adults we do not know what the world looks like do we? The father thinks that he will have at least ten days before his son figures it out so he can get on with his work. But just a short while afterwards, the father is working away and suddenly the child comes back and says, “Dad, I figured it out, I put the world back together.” The father thinks it can not be, my son doesn’t even know what the world looks like, how could he have possibly put it back together, but he got up and went with his son to see what he had done. In fact he saw that the son had put the world back together.  He had put all the pieces in proper order. So he asked his son, “How did you do this if you didn’t even know what the world looked like?” He said, “Dad when you cut the picture out of the magazine I saw that on the other side of the map there was a figure of a man and I know what a man looks like.  So I turned all the pieces over and put the man back together and then turned them back over.”

Do you like this story?!

I think what this story really tells us is that we must never lose sight of the human person as the center of everything that we do. If we lose sight of the human being, those real men and women who need our help and attention, then whatever we do will be lost.

When we see that millions and millions of dollars are spent for armaments while hundreds of millions of children live in hunger, we have to say that this is a tremendous injustice. We have to recognize that this is a crime against all of humanity. We have to join together and work to build a different kind of consciousness, a different kind of awareness, and critical thinking for all of humanity. This is something that we have to do in order to defend our families and all of society. We have to overcome a kind of unitary way of thinking that has emerged over recent years, this notion that there is no alternative, that there is no other way of doing things. We have to overcome this kind of thinking. Otherwise this means the death of our identities, it means the end of our different cultures and our different realities.  This is a real possibility for our future. When everything is reduced to its monetary value and not its human value than we have a real problem. We need to develop a cultural resistance, a spiritual resistance, in order to develop a new awareness, a new way of thinking of the possibility for each and everyone of us to think for ourselves. We must do this in order to strengthen the identity and the life of each and every person.

This year on February 15, 2003, the entire world came together in a global demonstration to say no to war. People everywhere all over the world, families, young children, young people came together to demand our right to peace, the right to a peaceful world. It called for an end to all war, particularly to the war then pending against Iraq. The call of the people everywhere, however was not heeded. However, we must persevere. We have to continue to work together to build peace because those who work for peace will build the future.

Those who make war and those who work for destruction will never build the future. This is why education is so important, education for peace, education for human rights, education of all people even beginning with children who are very young. We have to work to develop a critical awareness, a kind of awareness that will enable all of us to work together for peace. This is why it is also so important for our churches to be committed in the struggle for peace. Our churches have to work for the life of all people everywhere. I think that is what God wants for all of us. He wants life, life in abundance not just for some, but for all people. So that all the people may enjoy their human rights and that there might be equality among all.

In Argentina, we work with what are sometimes called street children. It is really a kind of misnomer because no children are from the street. The police usually treat these children as delinquents and not what they really are, victims of a society who has cast them aside. In our work with these young people, when there can be a dialogue and their hearts can begin to be opened, we find a dramatic change in their life. These young people are then are able to bring about real change within their own families. They serve as an example to their own families and then we begin to see changes in behavior and conduct within families and this brings about a change in the reality of family violence. Often times we see the parents are so busy with other things that they don’t seem to have time to dialogue with their own children but this dialogue is essential if we are ever to build peace. When such a dialogue can really begin, then we see that change can really happen.

I want to refer now to something else - to words. Often times we use words very lightly, we don’t really think about what they mean. But words are really energy. They have a tremendous power. Words have the power to love. They have the power to build, to construct, but they can also be deadly, they can be mortal weapons. Mahatma Gandhi used to say that lying is the source of all evil. Look around our world and think about how many of our government leaders lie on a regular basis. What does that mean? We often find many, many lies in our past, but we can also see that lies are short lived, the truth always comes out. The truth opens the door to another kind of understanding.

There is an ancient proverb. The disciple goes to his master and asks his master to teach him the way, to teach him the way without words. The master says to him, “Ask me without words.” I think this is the kind of sense we have to develop each of us, a kind of very deep understanding of the real meaning of words, and begin to give them their real value. In this way we can open hearts to the possibility of new understanding and new ways of living together and building peace. This is why we have to develop this critical awareness, we have to develop respect for values, values that enable us to engage in dialogue and that enable us to find new ways and build new ways of living together with others.

In our work today throughout Latin America, we really work around three major problems, three areas that are of deep concern for everyone throughout the region. These are on the first hand the free trade area of the Americas, the FTAA. This is a proposal that the United States is seeking to impose on peoples and countries throughout the region. The second major problem is the growing militarization of Latin America. This is a very real reality with the United States introducing troops and bases throughout the region. This is something that will provoke a very strong crisis, a very deep crisis, for all of our countries. The third problem that we deal with is the problem of external debt. It is what I call the eternal debt.

These three problems, these three areas, for us are critical, because the future of our people, the future of all families, the future society, the possibility of our present and a future for our children and our children’s children depend on our ability to resolve these three very critical problems. I always say that the future will be built on the basis of the courage we have to live each day. We will reap what we sow today, there is no other way.

I want to conclude with a final message that comes from the south of Mexico, from the region of Chiapas, where I was visiting in May of this year.  This region of Mexico is where many indigenous people live. We were in Chiapas participating in the first hemisphere gathering on the militarization of Latin America. In one of the breaks we went outside to get some cool, fresh air, and we sat together with a group Mayans, Indians brothers and sisters of that culture, a culture of thousands of years. We were talking about development.  Development is something today we have to define. We have to know whether we are talking about economic development, or sustainable development, or political development or whatever kind of development. So in this conversation I turned and asked my Mayan brothers and my sisters what do you think about development? They opened their eyes wide open and asked, what do you want to develop? More computers, more electronic gadgets, more cars, is that what you want to develop? I asked them again, in your culture what do you want to develop? They said, well in our language the word “develop” doesn’t exist.  I asked, what then does exist, what do you use, what word do you use to describe what we understand as development? They responded the word that we use is equilibrium, or balance. What a difference in concepts between balance and development! Harmony has to do with balance, and equilibrium, a relation between and among human beings, between human beings and our neighbors, between human beings and God, and among humans and the entire cosmos.

When this equilibrium is shattered then violence comes into our world. That is what we are living today, a world whose balance, whose equilibrium has been destroyed. That means life for the universe and the future of all human beings is shattered. How can we go about reestablishing that balance? This is something that has to begin with each one of us. It has to begin with each of us in our own hearts and in our own minds. Because I want to insist that none of us can give something away that we do not ourselves possess. This has to do with the essence of democracy, the possibility of building human rights and defending human rights and building peace.

Peace is not the absence of conflict, and peace has nothing to do with being passive. Peace is rather a permanent dynamic of life and human relations. Peace means reestablishing that balance in life, a real equilibrium and that’s something that begins with each one of us. We have to find that balance in our own life.

I am a survivor of the horrors that we lived through in Argentina and that were lived through by many people throughout all Latin America. I have seen a lot of death and I have seen death from very close up. But I have also seen an enormous amount of hope, and it is that hope that gives us the strength to continue to struggle for life and for peace. We cannot sit back and wait for others to do what we ourselves are not prepared to do. We have to each one of us to become protagonists for our own lives, and we then will be protagonists of peace and a future for all people. When we see the strength of women’s movements throughout the world, or the action of indigenous peoples, when we see the kind of international solidarity that exists between and among so many people that is where our hope lies, and that’s where we know where the future is being built.

There is an Argentine musician with a very beautiful song that kind of sums up this message. The songs says, “Everything is not lost, I have come to offer you my heart.” That is what each of us must do. It is a very simple message but a very beautiful message that calls upon each one of us, wherever we are, to become a protagonist. To become a protagonist whether it is here in this temple, or in the university or wherever we are.

I just want to say in closing that I hope you will never forget García Márquez’s little story. I think it sums up in very simple terms what is the challenge of life, what is the challenge of building peace. I think when we are feeling a bit tired or anguished we can remind ourselves that our commitment to work for life and for peace, however or wherever we carry it out, is something we can achieve. This so each and every child can look at life and smile on life.