I think our idea of "deterrence" as the answer to aggression is a legacy of war. For fifty years, our minds have been trained in this way of thinking, a kind of infrastructure of dualistic thought that has not yet been disarmed.

Now we have identified "criminals" who are really our own nation's children, as our enemy, and we are impoverishing ourselves to build prisons instead of schools and universities. A powerful financial and industrial complex is rising up around prisons that will be as difficult to dismantle as the missile systems are.

If I have learned anything, it's that people must be treated with exquisite individuality. The more we classify people and warehouse them in groups — "prisoners," "mentally ill," "condemned," — the less we can see who they are and be of help.

I keep a quote from Suzuki Roshi taped onto my computer: "To realize that things are one is a very sympathetic understanding. But how to treat things one by one, each in a different way, with full care, that, I think, is your practice."

Melody Ermachild Chavis, Not Turning Away by Susan Moon