…I don’t believe that desire alone can bring success or fear alone can result in failure — it is easy to box ourselves and accept these forces as having all the influence we allow them to have on our perception of reality…

…within our attitudes, behaviors, actions, and words; we have the capacity to define the outcome of just about any situation we encounter…whether we realize it or not…we can just as easily kill someone by simply telling them to die as we can give them a new lease on life by simply telling them to live…and the same applies to what we tell ourselves every moment of our lives…

“We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid his daily bread. And the Shiite would pray with the Sunni in one line. And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ, may peace be upon him. And despite the fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more than 10 years, for more than a decade.

And at the time that the Iraqi prime minister came out on satellite channels to say that he didn’t sleep until he had checked in on my safety, and that I had found a bed and a blanket, even as he spoke I was being tortured with the most horrific methods: electric shocks, getting hit with cables, getting hit with metal rods, and all this in the backyard of the place where the press conference was held. And the conference was still going on and I could hear the voices of the people in it. And maybe they, too, could hear my screams and moans.”

Many have long forgotten the genocide in Rwanda circa 1993-1994. Depending on where you shop for your daily dose of facts, those who still remember know that this catastrophe saw the systematic termination and massacare of anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million innocent human beings while the world watched, doing absolutely nothing about it…