1:00pm August 2, 2014

“

You wonder how a system so sophisticated, so technologically advanced, can treat people with such cruelty. Of course, it is not the system at all. It is one doctor, two nurses, an aide, or an orderly. It is people who lock people into seclusion rooms, and it is people who affix the leather cuffs or the chains or the gauze strips. It is people who do this and who do not have the courage to confront the unimaginable. It is people who believe they must do what they must do and that what they must do is the expedient thing. It is people who justify torture. “We’re only trying to help. We don’t know what else to do,” they say, with their refrigerated voices.

Does it really matter what else you do? Or is it enough to acknowledge evil, which is indifference to suffering and indifference to the sacredness of the human person? The only way to fight evil is to unmask it, to speak up, to refuse to participate in it, to not be indifferent.

But to us, the hostages of evil, the feeling of endless time is crushing. For us, even when the door is opened, the restraints loosened, we remain captives. We can never forget.

”

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