Danielle Levy

UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos is concerned that the humanitarian crisis in Syria will grab the headlines and edge out those places which can compete with it in terms of unmet needs and horrific stories, places like Yemen, the Sahel and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In fact she thinks the human emergencies in those places will dominate the coming year. Women and children are most at risk and in Syria many aid workers have been kicked out. After a visit to Damascus, Amos reported that she is “extremely worried” by the impact of the violence on ordinary Syrians. I am always moved by the inequalities of the world. While we in the West are ushering in the new year with customary panache, many thousands are struggling and suffering in ways that are not possible for most of us to comprehend. People around me talk about holiday and other stresses and enumerate various frustrations. And I wonder if, by comparison, we ought to question the reason for feeling those stresses and frustrations in the first place?

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates is thoughtful, knowledgeable, even wise in his assessment and understanding of the issues he had to handle. During an interview with Charlie Rose when asked what he knew of the woman led team that hunted Osama Bin Laden, he replied that he had not known of any woman led team. He was as some may remember one of the few privy to the raid as it was taking place. If one is to believe him, his response does not correspond to the portrayal of the hunt for 9/11’s mastermind in “Zero Dark Thirty”, the movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal, where the character of Maya is clearly the team leader. The movie also raises issues in its depiction of the role of information obtained through torture. It implies that torture led to useful information, when several key sources over the last few years have seriously challenged that conclusion. The discrepancies are hardly surprising, despite claims of research—let’s note in all fairness Bigelow’s and Boal’s use of the word research and not truth—the filmmakers’ priority had to have been those of movie making, where the need for emotional impact has been known to trump facts. They were, after all, not filming a dissertation, they were making a movie they hoped would be successful by Hollywood standards. Rightly or not, I assume that unless one is a news junkie, one would more likely accept the film’s version of events as truth. Movies that are documentary-like, that present facts via Hollywood or tilt towards a given perception are far from a new phenomenon. Still whenever they made they come with a question, how harmful are they to the social fabric of the nation?

It’s difficult not to be shaken by the story of those we now call the Central Park Five, of the injustice of being accused of a crime you didn’t commit, of what led to it and of what compounded it. And yet in that story there is good in an unexpected place. It comes through Matias Reyes, the actual perpetrator of the crime, and apparently other such crimes. Reyes seems as criminal as they come, and yet at the Auburn Correctional Facility he meets one of the defendants, Khary Wise, and comes forward to confess because he said he is struck by Wise’s suffering. It’s easy to forget that people like Reyes have good in them, and even more that that good can prevail. It may not have kept him from committing crimes, but it did make him take responsibility for one he hadn’t yet been accused of, and it did make him come to the aid of a fellow prisoner, and in this case four others. As distressing and unsettling as the story of The Central Park Five is, Matias Reyes makes me feel hopeful. If someone like him can exercise what had to have been a seed of innate good, then it may be that good is something we need to learn how to nurture and bring out.