South Korean Peace Statues, according to the NPR journalist Elise Hu are:
The girl memorializes women like Ahn Jeom-sun. She's now 89 and says she has visited the statue often. It symbolizes the youth she lost at age 13, when the Japanese Imperial Army abducted her from her village...The United Nations estimates 200,000 girls and women — mostly Koreans — were seized from villages to join Japan's military sexual slavery program before and during the Second World War...
She and the others came to be known as 'comfort women.' They served at temporary brothels near the front lines — often tents or wooden shacks surrounded by barbed wire — and were forced to have sex with as many as 70 men per day.
According to the news story, the Japanese government would like all of these statues to be taken down.
One could only guess the reasons for this.
Shame.
Guilt.
Denial.
Anger.
A combination of all 4.
And here's the really strange thing, I get it.
Whether it is an individual, a family, a community or a country, to have your ugliest parts out there for everyone to see is extremely painful.
Because to be willing to take a long, hard look at the worst aspects of our own humanity can feel like torture because it forces us to say publicly: This Too.
It forces us to say, I am this, and I am also that, and this forces us to engage in hardcore complexity.
Unfortunately though, those who are feeling vulnerable and exposed because their ugly imperfections and perpetrations of violence have become visible to the world, do not talk about their shame, guilt, denial, and anger.
No, instead they take the offensive. They attack the victim, and say things like:
Why can't you let it go?
Why do you have to keep bringing up the past?
It wasn't really that bad.
And sometimes, brutally, they might even say:
It didn't really happen that way. Or worse: That didn't happen.
When I was home sick from work recently, I watched the 2014 film depiction of the 1993 Newbery Award winning young adult novel The Giver.
For those of you who are not familiar with the movie or the book, it is a cautionary story about a community that has made the decision to eliminate any and all visible aspects of human suffering from the lives and memories of its community members.
They do this by:
-naming words like death and murder as "releasing to elsewhere,"
-forcing every individual to get an injection each day that anesthetizes their entire emotional landscape, and
-eliminating and eradicating all painful (and ugly) memories of past horrors like war and human conflict for everyone except only two people in the community called The Giver and The Receiver.
And the consequence of these decisions is a community of human beings who do not grow in wisdom and compassion, which only then perpetuates more suffering a violence in future generations.
I thought about the message of this film and novel this week as I listened to the NPR news story about the kidnapping and mass rape of hundreds of thousands of girls and women.
I also thought about all of the women, men, boys, and girls who I have known in my personal life and my professional life, who have never been validated in their experience of violation, pain and suffering.
In fact, I thought about all of the invalidation they have received with those very same cruel statements:
Why can't you let it go?
Why do you have to keep bringing up the past?
It wasn't really that bad.
And sometimes, brutally, they might even say:
It didn't really happen that way. Or worse: That didn't happen.
It also made me wonder what it would be like to see the equivalent of the South Korean Peace Statues in this country in relation to:
-our history of genocide of millions of Native Americans,
-our history of slavery of African Americans,
-our history of oppression, sexual violence and maltreatment of females, and
-our history of complete disenfranchisement of the LGBTQ population?
Similar to the South Korean Peace Statue that could be in places as ordinary as the city bus,
what would it be like to see a statue of a black man underneath a tree in Central Park that was a physical reminder of our American history of lynching?
Would it make us pause? Look? Cry? Remember? Grieve? Grow in wisdom and compassion?
Over the years I've begun to think of forgiveness as a composite process or action, as opposed to a singular action.
Similar to hurt, which I think of as a composite of sadness, anger and disappointment, I've come to think of forgiveness as a 5 Step Process including:
Suffering + Radical Acknowledgement + Grief + Wisdom + Compassion,
and I can very clearly see the role of statues, memorials, art work, songs, plays and holidays to aid in this 5 Step Process when the suffering or violence has been on community, national or international level.
It is an honest, elegant and concrete way of saying This Too- as many times as we need to.
And that is a good start.
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