The dancing, the poems carried the message,
Viscerally.
In our muscles, our bones.
Words,
letters from the interned.
A connection –
tenuous but important
to those left behind.
A thousand tiny red origami cranes
moving with the hands of the dancers,
forming shapes,
a heart.
The presence of people
black, brown, white
so warm and right.
All one
together.
Japanese Internment.
Immigrant Detention.
Incarceration of minor drug offenders.
Genocide of Jews, of Armenians,
Indigenous Peoples,
Africans on slave ships.
Apartheid.
Segregation.
The pain of separation
one group from the rest
is a ripping pain,
ripping
our Selves
apart.
No longer whole.
For the oppressed side
immediate,
horrendous
pain,
their very lives threatened.
The oppressors
hide,
numb themselves
to the pain
eating them
from the inside out,
killing them, too,
soul dead.
We cannot be whole without all of us present.
When I left the Art Response I carried with me a desire to never again be in a gathering without everyone there, every race, religion, culture, age, gender.
All the living and non-living things in the Universe are One Being emerging from one singularity. All pain belongs to all of us. When we hide ourselves from the ugliness of the pain we have caused, deny the pain, it becomes a disease eating us from the inside.
We are oblivious to it and it will destroy us all.
Never again. Never again. NEVER AGAIN!