Flash Flood or Slow Drizzle

Gretchen Werner

Survivors are still combing through the rubble looking for one last scrap of hope that they can stitch back into their torn lives, their tattered dreams and broken families. No one can go back to September 10th. The disaster hit without warning - like a flash flood. Was this the end or a beginning? I hope it is the beginning of a new awareness.

I grew up ninety miles north of ground zero. The stories unfolded from friends and family as the year 2001 came to a close. My sister lost fourteen neighbors in her town in NJ. My brother lost his Wheaton College classmate, Beamer. Tragedy wounds as the survivors try to re-create meaning in their lives from whatever is left. My grandparents knew this well when they fled Dresden in the 1940's with only the clothes they were wearing. History repeats itself. This time a new set of actors and a different stage stunned Americans.

That disaster took the lives of somewhere around 3000 people. There's also been a slow drizzle here in America that has ripped apart the lives of almost two million.* Children have lost their daddies, wives have lost their husbands and people have lost their citizenship. Soon one out of every twenty* Americans will be incarcerated. For black men, it's one in four.* These aren't the heroes - they are statistics, not glorified, but demonized. They are hidden in the lie that removing them from our faces will allow us to live in freedom.

"What about doing the harder task of digging not only into the rubble of NYC,
but into the rubble of our society, our laws, our fears?"

We move the weapons from our soil to theirs. We move the guns from the hands of murderers to the hands of prison guards. What if instead of shifting the weapons and guns, we shifted our hearts? What about doing the harder task of digging not only into the rubble of NYC, but into the rubble of our society, our laws, our fears? Can we stitch these remnants of hope back together?

I spoke with a woman in Harlem whose apartment used to give her a view of the Twin Towers. She told me that death is nothing new - it's all too familiar in her neighborhood where the infant mortality rate is equivalent to the developing countries of Sri Lanka and Thailand. Death is daily.

Americans proved their commitment and strength by pouring millions of hours, dollars and hope into the September 11 disaster recovery effort. What about our own un-natural disaster of in-justice? We learned about a new type of prejudice this past year. But the old, darker prejudice is still around. A few hours north of here [EMU] in Baltimore and Washington DC our black brothers have a 56% chance of going to prison. What if instead of eliminating people - from our face and our hearts-we eliminated the unholy parts of our selves to live in true freedom? History might tell us that we can never be free of surprises, but perhaps a freedom within will allow us to do the harder task.

Change only happens when there is a shift - not in our guns and weapons, but in our hearts and minds. To open the possibility of peace, I believe we need to not hide, but look deep into our own hearts and look our brothers and sisters straight in the eye and be ready to hear the truth. People are losing their loved ones every day and we've become immune to this disaster. Can we give victims a voice and offenders a choice? It's time for communities to take action. True justice leads to lasting peace. Flash flood or slow drizzle - we don't want either. Let's roll!

Underneath a harm
There is a man
Underneath a man
There is a history
Underneath his history
There is a child
Underneath that child
There was a pain
Underneath a pain
There is a need for justice
Underneath a need for justice
There is a harm.

*crime statistics from www.ojp.usdoj.gov

Gretchen Werner came to CTP's MA program from corporate America. Her primary interest is restorative justice.