Open Letter to My Oppressors

To my oppressors,

I am the oppressed. I am one you’ve trampled upon and think you own, but I am not one that will stay silent. I am the voice you want to suppress, kill, torture and imprison. I am the voice calling for liberty against your desire to keep enslaved. I am the voice you loathe that dares ask to be treated as an equal, the voice you despise for rising up because you think yourself the master. I am a voice part of a repressed generation whose lives you stole, whose wealth you hijacked whose freedom you took and whose eyes you’ve blinded. I am the voice that screams your ugly deeds to be muted to whispers amidst your rowdy lies. I am the voice that speaks a truth merely stumbled upon in books, streets and dominions beyond your control. I know this voice is one you want to silence forever.

I write to you forgetting your ugly horrible deeds of torture, murder, treason and manipulation. I write to you forgetting that you do not listen and cannot listen. I write to you forgetting your hatred of my very existence and your thirst to destroy me. To you, I am an expendable waste of space but a nuisance nonetheless. I write to you forgetting that such words will never reach you whether you read them or not.

My message to you is this. Stop what you are doing. These are real lives you are destroying, these are real people whose lives you are taking. These are real people you’ve imprisoned, these are real people you’ve hurt. I know that they seem remote to you, like enemies or lesser beings, but think upon them with the love you may have for your children or your families. Have you not that much love in you to see how they too can be loved? Do you not see the extent of the damage you have done and are doing to other human beings? Have you become too selfish and too self-involved to have any kind of sympathy?

I do not ask you to consider your acts before God. Men like you are beyond any to moral derivation of any sort. I ask of you to think of the little love you have left inside you in order to relate to humanity. You are beyond redemption perhaps, but even men who are beyond redemption have some sort of humanity inside to battle this hatred you have for others.

Look beyond your selfish love for your own and understand it could be your children in those jails or your friends run over by armored carriers. Understand that it could have been your daughters stripped and humiliated by soldiers. We are bound to one another as human beings and there is no room today for the illusion that you own another human being.

You old men, what will you reap but your deeds? Your grave is near and your days are numbered. No one knows if the next world brings nothing or retribution. But even if there is nothing beyond this life, you will only leave behind an evil legacy.

My oppressors, my killers, my wardens, I forgot your titles and addressed you as human beings. I send those words out to the human inside you that ceased to exist. I send them out with love, a concept you’ve long dismissed. I dropped my resentment for this brief instant. Why have you built a wall of hatred between us? I would tear that wall down instantly if it were up to me. This wall of your making and the choice has always been yours. The hatred you sow, you’ll reap.

Never yours,

The Oppressed