Dear President Obama,
When I was 17, I conceived of a service project which involved letting all the animals out of the zoo. I had been selected by a civic organization as one of 12 youth to represent Seattle in overseas trips to sister cities Kobe, Japan and Rotterdam, Holland. Part of our our commitment was to perform a service to the community. While my plan never materialized to release exotic animals back into the "wild" of North Seattle, the sentiment was the best my idealistic teenage mind could come up with.
The sentiment remains strong when I contemplate the uneven leverage of "justice" meted by the U.S. Government in the decade+ since 9/11. Guantanamo Bay, an issue you once saw clearly on but have failed to follow through on, is but one example. The conditions and terms of confinement at the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, IL is another. As depicted by Noor Elashi in McSweeny's #43, the facility houses some individuals guilty of no crime other than funding civic organizations also financed by USAID and other government agencies. This should bother you for two reasons. The first is that the conviction proved no connection to terrorism, but rather punished people essentially for being Muslim, demonstrating our continued commitment to a troubled history of extermination, oppression, enslavement, and systematic disempowerment of populations who seem to threaten a particular concept of life to which we summarily feel entitled. The second reason this case should bother you is that, by sentencing Ghassan Elashi to 65 years for an act also partaken of by the U.S. Government, we have by extension convicted ourselves.
If we focus on the thought of wild animals on the loose, freeing them from captivity will never sound like a good idea. The fear this image inspires triggers a defensive reaction in all of us that reinforces the status quo. What we fail to see, in the status quo, is that the act of imprisonment of innocents makes us as vicious as those animals. When we stare through glass and bars at living beings whose liberty has been robbed through no fault of their own, and yet justify their imprisonment, we extinguish the humanity in ourselves. I am not saying that zoo animals and prison inmates are in any way similar; my point is that, by capturing, dominating, and imprisoning that which we fear, in both cases, it is we who become the monsters.
True freedom requires a degree of vulnerability in relation to others. Our American refusal to tolerate our vulnerability in the face of unfamiliar "others" is the central failure of our experiment in democracy. You are a president who has the ability to see this. Please cease kowtowing to the forces of fear holding our government hostage, in the name of bipartisanship, and lead the way you were built to. Call out our hypocrisy and toxic elements while you have the wherewithal to do so. Start us on a new course for America.
Andy Varyu
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