“Art is a Wonderful Way to Open the Heart”

Friend (and drama coach!) of Amnesty International Group 22, torture-survivor Hector Aristizabal has scored himself a cover story in the Pasadena Weekly for his one-man play Nightwind.

“Art is a wonderful way to open the heart,” he said. “When the heart is open we are able to have the difficult conversations on issues that most people prefer to deny or not to look at.”

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“Many times I have felt like a terrorist, like I could be vengeful, and I can find all the rationalizations in the world to justify becoming a killer. But that would make me one more person who has become so dehumanized as to have to dehumanize others, which I feel we, as a society, are becoming now under the cloud of fear and fundamentalism that allows us to go across the ocean to kill civilians in other countries,” he said.