Breaking borders, breaking structures, breaking guns…through nonviolence, love, and the imagination

By Kristen Kuriga

Last night I dreamt I was in Colombia. I was walking down the street at
night alone and the lighting was dim. A man with a machine gun came out
from behind a building and forced me to the ground. He put his gun up
to my head and I could hear him slowly pulling the trigger back. My
heart was pounding as I lay with my face on the cold concrete. Am I
going to die? Everything was in slow motion. As I heard the bullet
coming out of the gun I grabbed the end with my hand and bent it. I
stood up, took the gun from the man, and broke it with my hands. I
threw the gun on the ground and walked down the dark street alone.

What I saw and felt of the conflict in Colombia is slowly drifting out
of the background of my mind and into the foreground of my dreams. In
the first days of my return I was filled with the joy and love of life
that permeated the organizations we visited and the spirit of the
conscientious objectors. I was and am inspired by what they have
transformed this conflict into for themselves: empowerment, alternative
vision, celebration of life, and standing up against injustice and
fear. That with a gun to their temple, they choose to break the gun
with their bare hands. That they believe it is possible to end violence
with nonviolence.

And I realize that I also took from this delegation the way that
violence and militarism creeps into our minds and our hearts, even when
we are not aware of it. As I remember walking down the streets of
Bogota and Medellin, certainly not alone, and especially not at night,
I saw many men and women with guns. Yet they were police officers and
military members, and for that reason, I think somewhere in me I
accepted their right to carry a gun. I realize how easily we have
accepted, and I have accepted, that in our culture those in authority
have the right to threaten and to use violence as a means of keeping
order. It took me back to the days following 9/11 in New York City.
When I first entered the train station or walked through the financial
district and saw men and women with machine guns and in riot gear, I
was startled. I had never felt so frightened, so much like I was living
in a war zone. And slowly I began to accept it. To see it as normal.
This morning I realize the depth to which I have accepted violence as
normal. How desensitized perhaps I have become to the constant war we
are living in.

My visit to Colombia opened my eyes to the reality of armed conflict.
For more than 60 years, Colombians have been fighting an internal war.
Disappearances, assassinations, mass displacement of peoples, mass
graves, curfews, and recruitment into military groups have become
normalized. All that I have read about social and economic structures,
globalization, conflict resolution, and peace and justice became real,
became felt for me.

What is it like to be a youth in this world of violence, militarism,
and war? On both sides of the delegation, Colombia and the U.S., we
talked about how the social and economic structures of our specific
contexts have attempted to dictate our options. In Colombia, as a youth
from a “barrio popular,” the options you are given is to fulfill your
mandatory service to the military and perhaps die or kill in the
conflict between the state, paramilitary groups, and the FARC and ELN,
to join the paramilitaries, the drug trade, or a guerilla group, or to
be part of the masses of unemployed. For youth from poor communities in
the U.S., especially communities of color, youth are presented with the
options to join the military, to work a minimum wage job in the service
sector, if you are “lucky enough” to get one, or to a join a gang and
likely end up in the rapidly growing prison system. Are these real
options?

Although the situation for youth on the surface seems so drastically
different in Colombia and the U.S., we were able to see the parallels
between these two contexts by sharing personal stories. Through the
practice of council, each of the U.S. participants shared on the topic of
“the experience of violence in your life,” with the opportunity for the
Colombian delegates to relate their own experiences to these stories
and mirror back to the group what they felt and heard. It was amazing
to me that in the sharing of these personal stories, youth from both
sides were able to see that not only was their experience personal, or
even representative of the context of their own community, but is a
reflection of the way in which global social, economic, political and
military structures have impacted their options and lived experiences.
It was clear that each person was an individual with a distinct story,
but that the themes and experiences knew no boundaries and no borders.

As we left Medellin to return back to Bogota, Tanya and I fought back
tears in saying goodbye to the members of the Red Juvenil who had
shared so much story, art, and passion with us. Sandra eloquently
shared something that moved me so deeply I was tempted to take out my
tape recorder and ask her to say it all over again. But I remember it
in my heart … she shared something like this:

“Do not cry for sadness because we are separating. Tears of sadness do
not accomplish anything. Cry for joy because you have made friends
here, you have made family. Know that we have made relationships, and
so now we can talk to each other and visit one another. Know that to
get to know each other, to build relationships, is to break borders.”

Breaking borders, breaking structures, breaking guns through
nonviolence, love, and the imagination. Despite all of the obstacles
and barriers to envisioning other possibilities, this delegation
brought together youth who refuse to accept that these are the only
options. That said, I want a different life for myself and for my
community. I don’t accept your structures and your limitations. I
realized the power of community and art to allow people not only to
vision, but to live a different reality. Several times on the
delegation we had the opportunity to discuss, what is a conscientious
objector? Is it refusing to serve in the military? Is it refusing to
participate in violence? Or as I heard from many of the men and women
in Colombia, that being a conscientious objector is refusing to accept
structures of injustice that have harmed me, my community, the earth,
and all people. It also seemed that implied in choosing the life of a
conscientious objector was the belief that all of this could change.
These organizations, these youth, show that it is possible by
living it.