by Glenn Beck
I told the man showing it to me, “Please, turn it off.” It had been given to him so he could ask for my help. It wasn’t me they wanted, it was my audience.
This image stuck with me for months. How many more before or since the little boy I saw? I have seen heads on pikes along the road and heads used as bowling balls. Both of those were just across our southern border.
I have seen things that I will never be able to unsee in the jungles of Thailand. In Mexico City I sat until 3:00 a.m. with women who had just been freed from captivity, listening to their stories and determination. I have held a newborn in Haiti. Her mother was a thirteen-year-old girl who had been raped up to ten times a day since she was eight. Her baby was alive only because our jump team rescued her before her traffickers knew she was pregnant; otherwise it would have ended the way the others had before. If it weren’t for us, no help was coming.
When I say us, I mean Americans. We are the people the most desperate pray will come and save them. The French aren’t coming. But they know that we will. Sometimes in uniforms, many if not most times not—just regular people who care and won’t take no for an answer. We are the ones who have the means and can be away from our children, because most of our monsters are only shadows in the closet or the groaning of the old furnace through the vent.
And it is us who should be coming! We should be exercising our Super Power. We should be flying into the fray, with the love and the sympathy afforded to us by our system, by our invention, by the capacity afforded to us by the incredible people we can be.
They pray for us to come.
I hope, for their sake, they don’t know how drunk we are, as just the thought that someone is coming is enough to keep you alive.
We sincerely do not appreciate the things we have until they are gone.
We are blind and ignorant too many times by choice. We are arrogant and unforgiving.
Because we can be and are stubborn and foolish almost to the point of being cruel because we don’t ever step back to see the bigger picture or, worse yet, just sit and listen.
The fifth step in AA comes after we have been broken in half. If we were not, we would never do this step, as it requires us to be dispassionate in self-examination and more vulnerable than we’ve ever been. It requires us to share all that we have done with another human.
They are not there to judge you, or to excuse you. They are only there to listen. There is something healing about saying all the things you know are true but have hidden for so long. It is a release. In the end, you realize none of that matters. Everyone has something like that in their life. But you are now one of the few who admitted it, so you begin to rebuild who you are. But this time on a solid footing.
I believe that the real wounds this nation has are the ones we think don’t matter. Like my mother’s death when I was a child. For years, I was “fine” with it. It happened, I dealt with it, I moved on. “It is in the past, I am fine, and there is nothing I hate more than people who whine about their childhood. Stop making excuses. We all have problems.” That is the way I used to feel when someone asked about my mom. You know how you may feel when someone brings up slavery? You just feel like rolling your eyes and saying, “Get over it.” But you really cannot until you have reconciliation.
It seems crazy now, but I really did think I was over it. I wasn’t. I had NEVER talked about it, EVER—not even with my wife. Until I began to sober up. It may seem crazy now to you, but if we are going to ever really get well and come back together, we are going to need to sit and talk. More important, we are ALL going to need to sit and listen.
We need the fifth step. What Martin Luther King Jr. called reconciliation.
It is hard and uncomfortable. But it also requires powerful strength to hold back human instinct, to avoid the temptation to pile on, accuse, judge, especially when the other is at his or her most vulnerable, to try to “win.” Winning requires a loser, and if we are going to come back together, there cannot be any losers.
Had Lincoln lived, I believe we would be a very different nation today—for the better. America had just gone through its biggest fight, even before the war itself. It had been fighting the scourge of slavery for almost two hundred years. It had gotten easier, as it had happened for generations, it was just how things were, and most were not around it. The vast majority, even in the South, didn’t own slaves, and almost no one wanted to talk about it. It was too horrible to address. People felt that we had paid the price in blood (600,000 dead versus 140,000 in World War II), the president was killed, and the slaves were free. Everyone was motivated to move on. And because Lincoln was dead and his corrupt vice president took over, the moment of reconciliation passed, and eventually the vengeance of the South rose again and brought with it hell and all its horrors.
It was the same in the 1960s. After almost a hundred years of Reconstruction, lies, Jim Crow, insults, and indignities, our blindness was ripped away. Kennedy was shot, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy, Charles Manson, Chicago riots, the freedom bus attack, church bombings, fire hoses, dogs unchained, and Altamont. It was a blood-soaked decade. After King was shot and the civil rights bill was passed, people wanted to move on, forget, and move back to easier times. We wanted to make sure we began to live up to the words in the Declaration of Independence, but no one wanted to sit down and just listen to one another. It is human nature, but we are not animals alone. If we want the privilege of being called men, than we need to do the hard work. Then, just like now, people were afraid of stirring it all up again. There is very good reason to worry. There are radical revolutionaries who have no intention of listening to MLK. But without closure, a wound this deep never heals.
Look how quickly one can exploit wounds. Just a few short years after Nelson Mandela’s death, South Africa is spiraling into hate again. This time it is the blacks who are the aggressors. The new president said recently, after the seizing of white-owned land, “The time for reconciliation is over.” This is what Mugabe did. His country starved to death, and his torture room and prisons were filled.
Now, no one wants to talk about it, because there are too many people with agendas. It seems like “leadership” just wants something. Blame, anger, and outrage will get us nowhere. This is where our churches have failed us, now three times. This is where this dialogue should be taking place. But the only goal is peace, a hearing, understanding, forgiveness, and unity.
People say it cannot be done. I disagree. Perhaps we haven’t hit our “bottom” yet and are just not willing to sit and listen to one another.
I had dinner with the Rwandan president Paul Kagame about a year ago. Beginning in the 1990s, the two tribes that made up Rwanda began to war with one another. Neighbors who had lived side by side and were good friends suddenly were dragging each other out into the streets and raping and slaughtering those same old friends. The ethnic Hutus butchered more than eight hundred thousand people in just under a hundred days. The minority Hutus were vicious in their efforts to “exterminate the cockroaches,” as was broadcast daily on radio. The cockroaches were, of course, the Tutsis. The dehumanization of their neighbors happened so quickly and so completely that it was breathtaking. Hutu neighbors raped entire families in the street and butchered them one by one. Hutu husbands killed their Tutsi wives.
Now, twenty years later, as the country struggled to get back on its feet, officials knew that they could not merely move on as a people and as a country. But the system could not handle the load. How could they handle the caseload, and even if they could, would that, in the end, bring peace and unity? The only thing they knew for sure was that if there were to be any hope for a future, they needed to find a way to try to bring justice to the almost two million Hutus directly involved.
The nation enacted what is called the Gacaca system of community justice. Once a week the community would gather, in a market or large building, but usually under a tree, to discuss the genocide and hear from the perpetrators. If you volunteered to come and con
fess, if you looked at the entire community and any remaining family of the people you killed, confessed what you did and where the bodies were buried, and asked for their forgiveness, you stood a chance. IF the family believed you, believed that you were sincere and penitent, you were released. If not, and you were convicted, your sentence was life at hard labor. For those who did not turn themselves in, the conviction rate was nearly 70 percent. For those who did and asked for forgiveness, the rate of forgiveness was 80 percent. There was no retribution or redistribution, merely reconciliation.
Tania and I sat and listened as two neighbors, Jacqueline Mukamana and Mathias Sendegeya, spoke of their friendship. How the two of them are once again true friends. How they help each other, and he now even watches over her children when she needs to complete errands. She has only one child and no other relatives. He butchered all the others in the street as she watched, hidden.
The story is not unique. Megan Specia in the New York Times tells much the same story, quoting Mr. Sendegeya: “We massacred them, killed and ate their cows. I offended them gravely.”
When Mr. Sendegeya was in jail, he was waiting for death, and reconciliation never crossed his mind, he said.
He reentered society through a program that allows perpetrators to be released if they seek forgiveness from their victims. While in prison, he had reached out to Ms. Mukamana through Prison Fellowship Rwanda.
“He confessed and asked for forgiveness. He told me the truth,” Ms. Mukamana explained. “We forgave him from our hearts. There is no problem between us.”
This is not an event. This is a way of life.
Today, Rwanda appears to be getting back on its feet. It has one of the fastest-growing economies in Central Africa. Rwanda has notched GDP growth of around 8 percent since 2001. The country reduced the percentage of people living below the poverty line from 57 to 45 percent in five years. Life expectancy, literacy, primary school enrollment, and spending on health care have all improved. Rwanda has also made big strides toward gender equality—almost 65 percent of those in Parliament are women, which has enabled women in the country to make economic advances. Women are now able to own land, and girls can inherit from their parents.
Currently, around 83 percent of Rwanda’s population of 10.5 million live in rural areas, and nearly 70 percent of the population still works in subsistence farming. But the government wants to change this.
In the long term, the government looks to transform the country from a low-income, agriculture-based economy to a knowledge-based, service-oriented economy with a middle-income status by 2020.
The country is far from perfect, and Kagame is not the man I would want for president, but if the people are to be believed and they can build years of trust between them, they will be the model for the whole world to study.
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The Only Thing Constant
Change is hard. I know that from my own experience. Sometimes it’s absolutely necessary, though; change or die is a pretty strong motivation. As an alcoholic, when I reached bottom, when I was blacking out, it was pretty obvious that if I didn’t stop drinking, my life as I knew it was over. Knowing that made change a lot easier. Easier, not easy. True change always is hard.
Letting go of my own outrage was more difficult, if possible, than stopping drinking. My well-being wasn’t in any danger. In fact, change was about the only thing that could damage my career.
And then I did what I am asking you to do now. And for the same reasons: Our country is in trouble, and buying into this us-versus-them mentality—that’s both sides—is making the situation worse.
I wasn’t helping at all; I was doing my best, but what I actually was doing was hammering in that wedge between the two sides a little deeper. I was adding to the problem. I have grown to understand that, as the great novelist Robert Harris wrote in Conclave, “My brothers and sisters . . . let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than other sin is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end.”
The third step in the AA program is to “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him.” I’ve interpreted that to mean a willingness to make a commitment to change; to accept the reality that you will have to give up certain behavior patterns. Among the things that make real change difficult is other people. Other people don’t want you to change. For the most part, you are a supporting player in their lives; you fit in a certain role and can be relied upon to do your predictable job. But when you change, everybody in your life has to respond to that change, and suddenly you’re playing a different role, you’re saying different lines, and you’re upsetting (at least in my case) the liquor cart. A lot of people don’t want to change, and they sure don’t want you to do it either. Those who are mired in their own addictions will try to drag you down; they want you with them in their misery. Your success in changing is threatening to them. It forces them to examine their own beliefs and behavior. And eventually they have to wonder, if you can do it, why can’t they do it?
One person who did not embrace my decision to take a more spiritual, conciliatory tone was Roger Ailes. Roger and I never really got along; he admired my work ethic and skill, I admired his intelligence and skill, but we didn’t see eye-to-eye about ethics. But Roger figured out years earlier that passion sells, and he was passionate about destroying the Democratic Party.
Roger built a great media machine, and when I joined Fox News it was already humming along beautifully and quite profitably. One day he made it very clear to me that he was not going to let me or anyone else cause any problems. After I got there, several people told me they could never leave Roger; they owed him so much. I was impressed by the fact that he engendered that level of loyalty. But I was wrong about that; as we now know, some of them literally owed him. It seemed to me he was always trying to find some way of putting me in his debt. He tried to get something on me. After the success of the Restoring Honor event in Washington, Rupert Murdoch invited me to his office, which was unusual. The rally impressed him, he told me, and he wondered what I intended to do with all that power.
“Nothing,” I told him. “I didn’t do it to gain power. I just wanted to bring people together and make a statement.”
“So you’re not running for anything?” he asked, which I thought was a curious question. In response I laughed.
For obvious reasons, I’ve employed a security team for several years. On occasion they’ve discovered that people were digging into my background. I’ve actually had people steal my garbage in hopes they would uncover something that would lead to a story. The biggest discovery was that I really like Chinese food. None of this surprised me. I considered it an occupational hazard. And I knew I had nothing to worry about; I’ve been incredibly open about my personal problems with my audience. There’s no secret card I hadn’t turned over myself. So I wasn’t shocked when my team informed me that once again someone was trying to investigate me. But when I asked if they had any idea who was doing it, this time the answer did surprise me: “We’re pretty sure it’s Fox.”
Weeks later I was in Roger’s office to discuss something or other. “You know,” he said, “this can be a pretty rough business.” I agreed; I’d seen it, I said. “There are a lot of bad people out there, Glenn,” he continued. Then he opened a bottom desk drawer, picked up a thick bunch of files, and put them on his desk. I’ve always believed it was just blank pages, but I had no way of knowing. “A lot of people have been investigating you from all sides.” He paused, smiled, and added, “You have a good wife.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I sat on the edge of my chair. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”
He continued, “It’s always a shame when a man does something to hurt a woman like that.”
Oh my gosh, I was ready to explode, I was so angry. Instead I said evenly, “That’s exactly why it’s never happened with me.
”
We just sat there staring at each other for what might have been thirty seconds. Then he put the file back in the drawer and finished, “I know, and that’s why I think you’re doing good and you’re safe.”
Whatever my feelings about Roger Ailes, I loved my audience at Fox. It was large, enthusiastic, and always supportive. But over time, I began to appreciate the magnitude of the problem America is facing and that my approach wasn’t helping to heal the divide. Gradually, I realized that the certainty I’d once felt had disappeared, and in exchange I’d gained what is much less valued: perspective. I learned pretty quickly that perspective doesn’t sell nearly as well as certainty. I could have kept up the charade; there was a lot at stake, but to be true to myself I had to change. I had given up on both political parties and almost all politicians.
At about this time I was having a spiritual conversation with a friend of mine, a farmer, as we were driving through his wheat fields. I was discussing the doubt that had been seeping into my mind when he asked, wisely, “Have you ever heard of Ezekiel?”
“Of course,” I said. In the scriptures Ezekiel is the Watchman on the Tower who was to give God’s warning to the people of Israel. “What about him?”
He then quoted Ezekiel 33:6 to me: “ ‘But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand.’ ” Then he glanced at me and added, “That’s quite a responsibility.”
I took him seriously. I had the trust of 50 million Americans a month, and I would not be the person they believed me to be if I didn’t get the word out about the trouble I saw coming over the horizon. I couldn’t be responsible for the way they reacted, but I am responsible for my own position. When I wavered—and there were times when I wondered whether I was doing the right thing—Ezekiel’s words came back to me.
