Enemy Images

Through nonviolence training I’ve gotten the impression that letting go of enemy images is a productive thing to do if I am to live a nonviolent life. I struggle with this. Some things that people have done are just wrong. I don’t have pleasant thoughts about Hitler, for instance, or about others closer to my life whose actions bring about deep pain in the world. I’ve been out there on the front lines. I’ve seen the desperation of people who don’t have enough to eat. I’ve seen the hopelessness of people who fall through the safety net.

It’s infuriating when people say things that are demonstrably false, misleading, and self serving while our country, our environment, perhaps the future of human beings on this planet, stands in the balance. To spend a lot of time trying to empathize with them when their actions seem so blatantly egregious just doesn’t do it. In fact to empathize actually feels enabling sometimes. Where is the space to express my outrage?

In the midst of all that, I still want to find a way to move from opposition to shared humanity.

A few years ago I took a workshop with Arnie Mindell. We were in rural, upstate New York. As I watched the mostly white, middle-class participants in this idyllic setting, conflict and tension seemed far away. It wasn’t long, however, before I found myself surrounded by a heated discussion on racism. The group started getting confrontational. I found shelter in silence, distance and noninvolvement.

Such escape evaporated when Mindell suggested we break into small groups. I felt only fear. I forced myself to sit down with four other people. We started with intellectual comments about how much we abhorred extremist groups such as white supremacists. Enemy images were very strong.  Mindell pointed out we were talking about people who weren’t present and suggested we have one of our members play the part.

A male took the part. Soon he and a female became engaged in a heated argument that went way beyond play acting. “Kill all the blacks” he yelled. “Guns are the only thing they listen to.” The white, middle-class women screamed her hurt and rage back at him. How dare he want to shoot people. She fought for peace, harmony, and above all nonviolence. The encounter escalated as they fired tirades back and forth. Suddenly a question came from the group to the woman: “if you could, would you kill him?” The silence was sudden and unexpected.  The truth was obvious to all of us. “Yes” she replied after some hesitation, “but I wouldn’t shoot him. That’s too violent”.

The most amazing transformation happened. She had acknowledged her violent feelings which she had previously ignored or denied. This vulnerability led, I believe,  to a place of deeper connection where her opponent felt freer to let out what he had previously hidden, his hurt and pain. He started to cry. They both had images of themselves, ways that they consciously defined themselves, and parts that they ignored, repressed or denied.

From this I learned how transformation can come from going deeper into places we are reticent to touch. To have the courage to clearly see the anger and hurt and fear I carry helps me begin to open to the  same fear and suffering in others.

From that place I can begin to see more accurately what is happening beneath the hard exterior of another, and the “other” may seem just a little less distant, more clearly a human being. Letting go of enemy images becomes less something I grapple with doing and more a bed-rock belief in shared humanity.

I am reminded of something Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago :

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his [or her] own heart?

This does not mean condoning violent or harmful behavior as both Martin Luther King and Gandhi showed in such powerful ways. Our willingness to accept these feelings within ourselves is a direct expression of compassion for ourselves and for others. Standing up then becomes not something I do for myself against the other but something I do for both of us. I mean this in the sense of what Eswaren writes about Gandhi:

He knew that the English were as much his brothers and sisters as the Indians. No matter what their actions, Gandhi could turn to his exploiters and say: ‘We will not submit to this injustice—not merely because it is destroying us, but because it is destroying you as well.’ Gradually even high-placed British officials began to respond to this approach..