I hope you have the patience for what may be an exercise in eclecticism, but I want to try to weave together strands from different places and parts of life to get to my point tonight.

A book due to be released in July, “A Promise of Justice,” by David Protess and Rob Warden, tells of the saga of the “Ford Heights Four.” At the end, it tells of testimony by one at a hearing in Washington, DC, last year, proposing five ways “to help restore justice to our criminal justice system” — abolishing capital punishment, allowing petitions for new trials any time evidence of innocence is discovered (severely curtailed by the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996), repealing legislation intended to speed up capital appeals, raising standards of and reducing caseloads on defense lawyers working at public expense and ensuring every defendant’s right to test possible DNA evidence.

He said, “These changes are absolutely vital if you don’t want to repeat what happened to us, and to many other victims of our system. But it seems that a whole lot of people nowadays, — they call themselves ‘reformers’ — want to cut back our legal rights when we need most to protect them. What motivates these pseudo-reformers to promote injustice? I think it’s fear. There’s fear of crime, fear of different skin color, fear of admitting mistakes. You got people here in the government who’re so scared, and who represent people who’re so scared, that they build more and more prisons while doing away with the safeguards that prevent them from being filled with innocent people. That’s frightening to me. We can’t go on being so scared of each other. We have to find a common ground, or else justice will be nothing more than a promise — an empty promise.”

“I’ve been afraid, and I guess you could say I used to be a racist, too. But it was mostly white folks who stepped up to help us. So there’s one thing I learned for sure in eighteen years: If we can conquer our fears, there’s nothing we can’t do.”

Those are the words of a man named Dennis Williams — one of the Ford Heights Four — finally fully exonerated after spending 18 years on death row in Illinois.

Now compare that thought, “...there’s one thing I learned for sure in 18 years: If we can conquer our fears, there’s nothing we can’t do,” to this one —

“I have learned many things in prison, but the most important thing is that for a human being, there is no difficulty that cannot be overcome. You just have to rely on yourself and you can get through anything.” Those are the words of Wei Jingsheng, the Chinese Pro-Democracy dissident who was released after spending almost 18 years in a Chinese prison.

In spite of their bitter experience, these two men, from very different lives, came to the conclusion that by conquering our fears and learning to rely on our own strengths, we can do anything.

I was once at an event for a group of attorneys in Los Angeles who work in the inner city. They represent people who live in slum conditions, helping them sue for their rights — their dignity — against slumlords who exploit them horrifically. A quote from one of the young children they had helped was used to make their point. “Mommy,” he said, “does this mean we don’t have to live in the rat house any more?” That conveys a clear, simple, easily understandable message. No one — least of all a child — should have to live among rats. But I asked them to consider another child, as well. Not this one who tugs at our heartstrings, but a child from the same set of circumstances who says, instead, “Mommy, I’m going to find the people who made you live like this and make them regret it.”

What happens to that child? Here are a couple of thoughts...

In May of 1995, Girvies Davis was executed in Illinois. Fifteen years earlier, while in prison for a robbery, it is said that then 20-year-old Girvies Davis gave police a hand-written confession to an unsolved murder. He was immediately taken from his cell at 11PM and driven around to refresh his memory. At the end of this ride, at about 4:30AM, Girvies Davis put his name to another confession, this one to 11 more crimes, 9 of them murders.

Subsequently convicted of four of the murders, Davis spent years in prison, had a number of unsuccessful appeals and was executed after being denied clemency by Governor Edgar. Not many people noticed. Among the things they didn’t notice was that Girvies Davis denied having written or signed the original confession. He confessed to the other crimes, all right, because the midnight ride was for the police to tell him what else he had done and to give him the choice of confessing or running. Most also didn’t notice that Girvies Davis had brain damage from a childhood accident and an IQ bordering on mental retardation. What they also didn’t notice, and what the police who produced the hand-written confession that convicted him obviously didn’t know, is that Girvies Davis was illiterate.

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Joe Spaziano was a bad guy. Head of The Outlaws biker gang in Florida in the late ‘70s, he was convicted in about 1976 of a rape and murder that had occurred two years before, convicted essentially on the testimony of an 18 year old who claimed that Joe had taken him to a garbage dump two years earlier and bragged about burying there two women he had “done.” Spaziano was convicted by a jury that recommended life in prison. Two of the jurors later admitted that they didn’t find the testimony particularly convincing, but since Spaziano was a biker and a trouble-maker they thought it was worth it to put him out of circulation. The judge, however, over-rode the jury’s recommendation and gave him the death penalty. After the trial it came out that the young witness had been hypnotized to help him recall the facts to which he testified. Ten years later the Florida Supreme Court held that hypnotically enhanced testimony was inherently unreliable and therefore inadmissible. They did not, however, make the ruling retroactive, so Joe stayed on death row. Another ten years passed and an investigator found the young man, now a reformed alcoholic and a Christian, 38 years of age, who was carrying a load of guilt and wanted to unburden himself. This man told the investigator, later the police and eventually special investigators appointed by the governor, that he had been told what to say at trial by the police and the hypnotist and had testified to things that had not happened. After a great legal struggle, much drama, a lot of breast-beating and cowardly posturing on the part of authorities who never want to admit to having been wrong, a brave judge threw out Spaziano’s conviction after 21 years on death row and five dates with the executioner. Because the State insists it will re-try him, however, he remains behind bars today.

Horace Kelly, who was adjudged sane enough for California’s citizens to kill despite the expert testimony of five psychiatrists who said that his inability to speak coherently, his tendency to store food in his toilet until it became moldy, his tendency to save his feces by rolling it into little balls and his belief that he was a security guard rather than a convict at San Quentin, suggested otherwise.

These are, of course, ugly cases. And while I won’t pretend to have given you a thorough analysis of them, there is enough information available about them and many, many others to demonstrate that there is something terribly wrong with the capital punishment system as practiced in our country today. And the capital punishment system is the ending place for too many of the children from the rat-infested places I mentioned earlier. And when good people do their best to try to make our society be what it should, make the actual practice of the law match the ideal that we claim to hold so high in our esteem, they are attacked as obstacles to justice instead of honored for the principles they demonstrate and the incredible courage they manifest. These people are heroes and deserve to be recognized as such. Instead, as we know from bitter experience, they are all too often demeaned, derided or, if they hold it, are run out of office.

And why? Why does that sort of thing happen?

Well, in order to zero in on a possible answer to that question, I want to take you rather far afield. To understand our society and what’s happening in it, it might help to look away and then back. Sometimes a new perspective helps us know why it’s so important that the work being done by this organization is supported and continued. And perhaps in the process we can consider why it is that important values one hears about less and less today, values like inclusiveness, compassion and hope, are urgent necessities for the successful continuation and growth of society as we like to think of it.

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“We are all ‘Hibakusha’.” The word Hibakusha means “downwinders” and refers to those who were not caught in the initial atomic blast at Hiroshima but, because of having been downwind, were nevertheless victims of the radioactive fallout. The phrase, “We are all Hibakusha,” opens the definition in a metaphysical way to include all of us. One way or another, through direct complicity, sympathetic understanding or as a function of an ineffable human interconnection, we are all at the effect of that horrific act.

The idea that we are all Hibakusha is emblematic, for me, of the sad fact that we too often allow ourselves to fall into the trap of thinking that we are not connected — until an event or set of circumstances slaps us back to the awareness of the delicacy of our situation here, the impermanence, the mutability of life.

Clarence Darrow once observed, “There is in every man that divine spark that makes him reach upward for something higher and better than anything he has ever known.” That is a potent description of the presence and irrepressibility of the human spirit — interesting from a self-professed atheist — one worth considering in difficult times.

I do some work on behalf of refugees and in support of human rights in the world. Let me offer you a few snapshots —

! El Salvador — Man in prison

! Chile — Woman in dark room

! VA — Joe G., “the Cooling Table”

! Bosnia — Dr., concentration camp — men tethered in circle

What these people have in common, I believe, is a fundamental understanding of the value and dignity inherent in their existence, in the commonality of their simple humanity, in the beauty, energy and possibility that comes with life on this earth. And from that they derive a power that is indomitable, that allows them to stand in the face of apparently overwhelming opposition. These individuals learned, through incredibly difficult personal experience, that by putting themselves out in the service of others they become more than they were. That is their contribution to the Great Ledger, as John Steinbeck referred to it. Their measure of themselves as people. In “Sweet Thursday,” Steinbeck said the big question is, "What has my life meant so far and what can it mean in the time left to me?" "What have I contributed to the Great Ledger?”

On the other side of that ledger, I was in Rwanda, in Central Africa, where a genocidal war had been fought just months earlier. While the civilized world averted its eyes, people were killed by the thousands in a bloodletting the ferocity and scope of which are incomprehensible to most of us. 500,000 to 1,000,000 human beings, mostly of the minority Tutsi tribe, died in a period of three months. Mass slaughters took place all over the country in a carefully planned and well executed campaign to assert control over the majority Hutu population by entangling them in an horrific act of cruelty from which there could be no turning back.

An arena specifically chosen for the slaughters was the church. The chief means of mass communication in Rwanda is the radio and through a diabolically clever propaganda campaign, as the murderers were inspired to kill, the intended victims were deceived into gathering in the churches by the promise that they would there be granted asylum. Once gathered they were slaughtered by the thousands.

The new Rwandan Government, left with the job of cleaning up the awful mess in the countryside, made the decision to leave a couple of the churches as they were found so that those who came after could see for themselves what had happened. After visiting one, the Church at Ntarama, I sat in my room in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and wrote the following:

  ! ! !

Rwanda — The Church at Ntarama

Everything I believe was challenged by the infernal tableau displayed in this place. Though the three buildings and the yard between them were all so full of remains that one had to tread carefully, the chapel somehow presented the most soul-bruising image, probably because one clings to the hope that it does represent on some level the salvation, the deliverance from evil that these poor slaughtered wretches were seeking.

Piles of bones, the outline of the body they once supported still defined by the ragged remnants of their clothing, lay where they came to rest, tossed, strewn about by the force of the blast, the bullet, the thrust of the spear, blow of the club, swipe of the machete. Again and again and again the machete.

Books, canes, toys, purses, thermos bottles, shreds of the last things they held — those which their murderers left behind — punctuate the sentences of death written by these heaps of what were once vital beings.

The air, suffused with a thick, hideously sweet, cloying, web-like quality, is almost impossible to breathe. It is as if, having stepped into a charnel house, a human abattoir, I am caught between here and somewhere else, between this dimension and another, and to bring this horror into my nose, mouth, lungs, is to invite in corruption.

This holy place, and it clearly was that to those who sought refuge here, is now mute testimony to the unholy. What moves here, what this intruder can see and hear, are the roaches, lizards and others that find their sustenance in the leavings. But what exists here, what insists that it be heard, is the faint echo of the shrieks and moans of the dying as they compete with the grunts and exclamations of those who did this terrible work; the delicate puff of air from a hand reaching out, fingers curling in despair; the hiss of the blade on its downward path; the final sigh of release from those who expected more.

If there is in man that divine spark, it has here been crushed, spat upon, reviled, denied. Has it been extinguished? Can it be? Will we allow it to be?

! ! ! !

As I’m sure you understand, it was awful. Not something anyone should have to see — or hear about — or certainly experience. But, like death row in America, because it is there it’s my belief that we need to hear about it, to know about it. And, more important, understand it if we can. You see, the perpetrators of these massacres were in large part members of a youth organization called the “interahamwe.” Males and females ranging in age from about 10 or 12 to their early 20s, without work and with little education, the interahamwe was the tool of an extremist faction of Hutus that controlled the government and had been the objects of a special education, an on-going campaign of virulent anti-Tutsi propaganda, for years.

Asked afterward how she could take part in the slaughter of innocents, people who had recently been her neighbors, one young woman answered, “I didn’t really kill anybody. I just finished them off.” Another said, “I wasn’t part of the killing. I just killed children.”

H.G. Welles once defined civilization as a race between education and catastrophe. Several decades ago, Mohandas K. Ghandi articulated what he called the seven social sins, one of which was “education without character.” Education can be used for many purposes. “Education without character,” the simple feeding in of selective information, can result in people being manipulated for purposes of evil, whether active or passive. There is a responsibility implicit in the exchange of information, the process of education, and the responsibility belongs to each of us who choose to be awake, alert, alive. We are all Hibakusha.

You see, unless we believe in something, be it Steinbeck’s Great Ledger or something else, unless we have a fundament, a platform, a place upon which to stand, the purveyors of information, the controllers of the dialogue, can become the embodiment of truth.

For us, the lesson that can be learned from Rwanda, it seems to me, is not that Africans are primitive savages of some lower order capable of bestial behavior, but rather that human beings, with limited life experience and even more limited education, are capable of being directed by accepted authority into behaviors that, on reflection, are shockingly inhumane.

If you remove the cultural trappings that describe the situation in Rwanda and replace them with more familiar ones and you have a scenario wherein a man or men can believe that the detonation of an explosive device at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, creating the gut-wrenching carnage that shocked, enraged and confused America, is a necessary, appropriate, and in some twisted way productive, act.

And it’s not only Oklahoma City. Clearly, the recent horrific events that have staggered us all testify that we can be victimized by purveyors of outrage from without as well as from within. But if we are to preserve our fundamental values we can’t trade them in when we’re under attack – any more than we can allow ourselves to forget them when we’re not.

When we hear the fear-inspired rhetoric in this country, denouncing and demonizing the target of the moment — yesterday a principled judge whose belief in equal justice won’t allow her to pander to the politically popular line, today someone of Middle Eastern heritage, tomorrow a supposedly bloodthirsty killer who eats children for breakfast — we have to remind ourselves that the purpose of this demonization process is to stop us from thinking; to manipulate our most base emotions. To make us followers. Listen to the lunacy of self-described “militia” leaders intoxicated with the power of their own paranoid ramblings — or crowds of people outside prisons at the time of an execution in a state of drunken revelry shouting “Fry the Nigger!” and wonder if we aren’t witnessing the development of our own version of the interahamwe. The unthinking mob. More, the anti-thinking mob.

How does it happen? It happens because people, without a sense of themselves, without a belief in their own value, without a place to stand, are subject to the ravages of fear. The fear Dennis Williams recognized, of which he was the victim.

Given the ethical collapse so sadly evident on all sides of the social and political spectrum, who can blame them? Watching professional athletes at the peak of their abilities, wealthy beyond their dreams, behaving like unthinking brutes; enormously successful businesspeople trampling others in pursuit of more and more of the almighty dollar; policemen and women losing their way in a whirlpool of money, dope and corruption; religious leaders wallowing in self-righteous condemnation of others and political professionals with no goal in sight beyond self-promotion, it is no wonder that people feel adrift and the young search in vain for models of appropriate behavior.

And as they search, add to the mix the stealthy phenomenon of media exploitation, not only of violence but of all human frailty, for its own competitive and economic ends and you have built the perfect trap for those who have allowed themselves to believe that the information they’re getting through the media and elsewhere is right, good, important and appropriate.

In fact, Dr. George Gerbner of the Annenberg School, studying the media and its impact on our society, describes what he calls the “dangerous world syndrome,” in which we, the recipients of all of the overwhelming and frightening messages put out by the media, begin to perceive the world as an even more dangerous place than it actually is, and because of this misperception begin to behave as though it is what we perceive it to be, arming ourselves, building fortresses, lashing out at others, creating the very world we fear.

The climate of fear that is created, and its cynical manipulation by pretenders to power, gives rise to monstrosities like “three-strikes-you’re-out” — a death row populated with juveniles, minorities, the mentally retarded and brain-damaged, victims of abuse, the innocent and those who cannot afford a defense — it gives us a re-segregated society — inner city violence — anger toward the homeless and impoverished — nativist and other anti-immigrant manifestations — anti-gay legislation — and all the many separatist, exclusivist policies that flourish.

In such a time, when people are frightened and easily manipulated, confusion abounds. And in the midst of this confusion arise voices; voices in the media, in popular organizations, in some of our churches, in business and in positions of political power. These voices are often articulate, persuasive and highly seductive, and are, in very clever ways, giving people permission to hate.

It is, though far more sophisticated, the same dynamic that taught those frightened, ignorant kids in the Interahamwe to kill their neighbors.

Because of clever, manipulative, power-seekers with honeyed voices, many lose their balance and grasp at easy-appearing, quick-fix solutions. They lose a sense of their own value, they lose a sense of the value of others and, with it, they lose what I consider to be the most important asset one can possess, the courage to love. They are on their way to becoming the Interahamwe.

So how do we deal with it? By being stronger than they are. By looking inside and asking ourselves those questions — reminding ourselves who we are and what we believe in. By being willing to take the flak. By listening critically and denouncing demagoguery wherever and whenever it appears. By looking for guidance in the principles we know and trust, though perhaps rusted and worn by lip service and misuse, and by anchoring ourselves in those beliefs and standing for what is higher and better, knowing the answer is not fear but love; not exclusivity, but inclusivity. By remembering that we are all Hibakusha.

And when the cynics deride our maudlin nonsense we can turn for help to those who have walked these paths before us: some of whom I’ve told you about tonight — and...

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, in “Man’s Search for Meaning,” says “...human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning.” In that damnable place he learned that "...love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. ...the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in love."

Susan Griffin, in “A Chorus of Stones,” writes of coming to grips with her own history of childhood abuse and the discoveries she has made along the way.

“It is said that the close study of stone will reveal traces from fires suffered thousands of years ago... I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about the battle of Dresden in 1945, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.”

Jim Wallis, of the Sojourner Community, says “Hope is the very dynamic of history. Hope is the engine of change... the energy of transformation... the door from one reality to another.”

“Hope unbelieved,” Wallis says, “is always considered nonsense. But hope believed is history in the process of being changed... The nonsense of slave songs in... Mississippi became the hope that let the oppressed go free. The nonsense of a bus boycott in Montgomery... became the hope that transformed a nation. The nonsense of women’s meetings became the hope that brought suffrage and a mighty movement that demands gender equality. The nonsense of the uneducated, the unsophisticated, ‘the rabble,’ became the hope that creates industrial unions, farmworker cooperatives, campesino collectives..”

The nonsense of those in a death camp believing they could survive became the hope of the human rights movement.

The nonsense of singing the histories of the abused, the neglected, the misshapen, the dysfunctional, the special, becomes the hope that rescues, resuscitates and resurrects pure human energy that has been trapped, ignored or discarded.

“Hope,” Wallis says, “is believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change.”

So it’s up to us. It’s you and me to whom Gervies Davis and Joe Spaziano and Dennis Williams look — to whom the children look — to whom the fearful look — to speak the unspoken truth — to sing the histories — to remember we are all Hibakusha — to find the courage to love — and to make safe the way for hope.

Thank you.