April 20, 2002

Letter submitted to Letters to America project

Dear People of America:

My father is Iranian, my mother Chinese, and I was raised in Canada. I love my family and community in Asia, and I love my friends and teachers in the West. In these frighteningly violent days, I feel that we are destroying ourselves in a civil war of global scale - brothers pitted against fathers, sisters against daughters - and I refuse to choose sides in the widening rift.

I have dealt with the ambivalence of a multi-cultural identity all my life, and no longer label myself as Canadian or Iranian or Chinese, Palestinian or Israeli, American or Afghan. It has been my experience that while superficially cultures differ and clash, you can sense the honesty and goodness of people from their eyes everywhere in the world, and a mother's loving hand can soothe a fretful child regardless of skin color. I feel that we create artificial lines on a map to separate state from state, Us from Them, when in fact all of us are threads in a tapestry, dependent on each other in order to know ourselves.

You in the United States have much to teach others in your vigorous energy, your hardworkingness, your friendly sociability, creativity, strong teamwork, and open dialogue. You also have many opportunities to learn. I think, more than anything, recent events have offered you a chance to understand first hand the suffering and powerlessness of many people in the world. For one day, you as a nation learned what it feels like to be a battered woman. To be a plantation slave. To be powerless in the face of inhumanity, and to understand the fragility of life the way so many do on this side of your border.

Being hurt is an opportunity to learn compassion, to (broken bleeding) see your own mistakes and darknesses, accept your vulnerability, and move on, softer and more human. I dearly hope this can be the case for you, as the lives of many in the world depend on your choosing - truly choosing! - peace rather than war. Values are worthwhile only when we hold to them when it is difficult, when we are in pain and the need to lash out overwhelms. You stand for many admirable values, and we need those to be more than empty words (Democracy, Justice, Human Rights) to restore health to our hurting world.

I have personally been affected very strongly by your decision to bomb Afghanistan. Having visited Afghan refugees in Pakistan, then travelled in Afghanistan for a week under the burqa two months before September 11th, I was in turmoil for September and then disbelieving when bombing began in October. I and several other young people from countries participating in the war decided to try and live with civilians in Afghanistan, thus discouraging 'collateral damage' with our presence. I travelled to Pakistan to research this initiative a few weeks into the US-led bombing of Afghanistan.

I was moved immeasurably when I saw my Afghans friends fighting courageously against impossible odds to help their people. The turmoil, the riots, the dying infants, the pain-wracked overworked Afghan humanitarian workers - your decision to bomb Afghanistan had negatively affected everyone I saw. My health broke down, and I left Pakistan to stay and recover with family in Iran, my mission a failure. Your mission in Afghanistan, on the other hand, succeeded.

Dear people of America, your generous help and support to those in need around the world shows your depth of caring and empathy, and I am thankful for the many of you who voice grief and anger at injustice.

Dear people of America, your actions have serious global consequences, and I am frustrated sometimes that you are so removed from the chaos that can follow in your wake.

Dear people of America, if I could face you all, I would offer you these words: while I like your strivings for excellence, your straightforwardness, your well-developed sense of justice, and your generosity, I dislike your foreign policy, your state sponsored violence, and your overly powerful business interests. You are the center of military, economic, and political power. You are the well-educated, the well-fed, the resourceful. Please don't waste your freedom or your strength! Please stop your unhealthy power games which degrade human dignity and foster enmity!

You are a critical factor in the struggle for humanity, and you need to see the world and your place in it as the interwoven interdependent fabric that it is. You need to work towards developing more intelligent and sustainable relationships with fellow humans, birds, beasts, water, fuel, precious air.

We are all hurtling around the sun together. If any of us consider ourselves above human and natural law, that spells disaster for all of us. Please reconsider your unilateralist tendencies, and let us all return to our commonality, to our borderless humanness, and to respectful co- existence.

With wishes of a tearful moment of quiet joy to transform your day,

Sarah Kamal