Sometimes it is all too easy to lose hope in humanity. Sometimes it is all too easy to forget the suffering and sacrifices of others.
Although the events surrounding Sept. 11 have awakened a renewed sense of nationalism and pride, we also need to remind ourselves of other tragedies, some of them even fomented by our own government.
While walking across the plaza to the EMU on Nov. 15, I saw several students enacting a grisly scene that brought back a terrible moment of reality for me. The students, surrounded by small white crosses, bearing the names of campesinos killed in conflicts in Central America during the 1980s, reminded me of years spent covering the war, interviewing combatants and refugees, and witnessing our own government’s involvement.
At first, I had to remember the date the students were reenacting. It was Nov. 16, 1989, just 12 years ago. Early that morning in San Salvador, El Salvador, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were taken from their sleeping quarters at the University of Central America and murdered in cold blood by an elite military squad of U.S.-trained Salvadorans.
The still forms of the students lying out in the rain brought back the reality of this atrocity. Some of the soldiers involved in the massacre had received training in the United States at the Army School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia.
The School of the Assassins, as it is often called, has been the target of a growing movement to close it down. The civil war in El Salvador (1980-1992) claimed more than 75,000 lives, mostly civilian. It displaced well over a million people. El Salvador is a small country, about the size of Massachusetts, and has a population of only several million. During the war, the U.S. government poured in more than $4.6 billion in military aid to stop what it considered communist aggression. In reality, this conflict was a people’s war against hunger, disease and abject poverty.
How could I forget the horror and destruction of this and many other conflicts around the globe? Will the cry of the poor and the oppressed ever be heard? But hope persists. Now, in the middle years of life, I have stopped to witness a new generation of individuals of conscience — people who act out of empathy for the oppressed of the world and out of anger against errant U.S. foreign policy. I am grateful for these students’ idealism. I am grateful that they take the time to reflect and care. But I am also ashamed of myself for not having joined them.
I am saddened that I did not take time to quietly lie in protest and solidarity on that cold rainy day in November. I am saddened that I didn’t take the time to think of the dead and to dream of peace.