What I hear both of you talking about is how do we not avert our gaze? How do we take these global humanitarian cries and crises and make them real, not abstract? How do we embrace suffering as part of our own conscience and consciousness and not be undone by it?
For me, it is the power of story. Story bypasses rhetoric and pierces the heart. It makes things known. When we hear a story, we become accountable for that sacred knowledge which has been shared. Story becomes the conscience of the community.
This is the power of your work, Mr. Kristof. This is the power of Paul Farmer’s work as a physician. Both of you bear witness and then you act. You create something on the page or in the world, a column, a health clinic, an awareness shared. This is transformative work. I used to think bearing witness was a passive act. I don’t believe that any more. Bearing witness creates empathy. Empathy enters our blood stream and we feel the world differently. Our consciousness changes and we are moved to action.
Frantz Fanon writes, “The colonial world is a compartmentalized world.”
One of the imperatives I see toward social change is to not only see but recognize as Gregory Bateson says, ‘the pattern that connects.” How do we begin to see the interconnectedness of all things. Economic issues are environmental issues are issues of social justice. The extermination of a species and the extermination of a people are predicated on the same impulses: prejudice, cruelty, arrogance, and ignorance that turn on issues of power and justice. If we cannot begin to see the interrelatedness of these things, if we choose to remain in a compartmentalized, fragmented, fractured world, then I fear we will continue to create and foster this seedbed of war.
We cannot understand social problems without looking at historical roots. It is impossible to change society without changing the societal stories. We must listen to the stories being told on the ground by those who have survived the abuses of power, those who bear witness and embody the resiliency of the human spirit. And resiliency is what I witnessed in Rwanda.
Again, the story, the stories — bearing witness ultimately leads us to action.
For me, this is the power of REPORTER, how one man relentlessly chooses to not only bear witness but respond to the horrors of war through people not policies. Kristof does not avert his gaze. He writes. His pen is both his paintbrush and his weapon. How can we not respond?
My question then becomes whose story gets told?
