None of the Above
As I write, the President and Congress are discussing how to respond to the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Not surprisingly, the blogosphere is full of strong opinions: that we must respond to the wanton abuse of citizens with chemical weapons, that bombing Syria would be a huge mistake, that force is the only solution, that force is never the solution, and on and on.
Here’s my best assessment: there is no good solution. I am certainly no expert on the political situation anywhere in the world, and certainly not Syria. But I get a sense of things from articles I read, and, frankly, the news is not good. As far as I can tell, no one in this fight is the hero, the virtuous protagonist who is bound to win in the end. We Americans love a narrative that echoes our national story of the little guy overcoming the superpower and establishing democracy to flourish for the ages. But whether or not that narrative is justified for the US, it certainly doesn’t look like it’s a tale that’s going to play out in Syria. People are being slaughtered. The suffering is immense. It’s hard to imagine that bombing anyone is going to help, but equally hard to just stand back and tell the world that there is now carte blanche to spray people with poison gas.
I would love to tell you what is right, what I think we should do, what we should all take to the streets and the airwaves and cyberspace to promote. Unfortunately, I have no idea. Here’s what I know. Life is full of untenable positions. As a minister you are called on to support people who have to decide whether to undertake medical procedures that will undermine the quality of their life even as they extend it. You counsel people who are trapped in unhappy marriages who know that leaving would be devastating for their children. You are there for people who are looking at providing years of round-the-clock care for a parent or spouse or child who is slowly failing, who want to give everything to their ailing loved one, but still yearn for a life of their own.
It feels a lot better when you can fix things, when righteousness prevails and happiness reigns. But that happens a lot less often than the stories and the movies would have us believe. All too often, there is no good answer, and whatever the conclusion, there is suffering as well as joy. What you learn as a minister is that while you may never have the stunning piece of wisdom that will set a suffering person on the way to happiness, you can listen. You can be prayerfully present, offering your witness to what they are going through. You can hope that in the conversation something will emerge that is clearer or more creative than what the person walked in the room with.
That’s all I’m able to advocate for at the moment – that there be as much listening as possible. As much prayerful presence as possible. As broad a conversation as possible. I hope that the conversation goes far beyond the president and congress, that it includes the UN, that Syria’s neighbors who are being flooded with refugees have a chance to speak. I hope that out of the listening there will arise some greater clarity, some greater creativity, than anything that we have yet seen.
I know that hope is not justified, that there is little that we have seen from anyone in the situation, including the US, that would lead one to expect something better than bombing. So, if nothing else, perhaps those of us who are without decision-making power, who have no control, can manage to be a model of that listening and that creative possibility. It’s not a solution, but it’s the best answer I know.
Where Danger Lurks
For the last week and a half the news has been pretty much all Boston bombing, all the time. Why wouldn’t it be? There was a horrific act of mayhem in which three innocent people were killed and 264 more were injured. There was a man hunt, a shoot-out, and a show-down that led to the capture of one of the perpetrators, who is now being grilled about his role in the terrible events. The media is full of interviews with everyone who has even the most tenuous connection with the Tsarnaev brothers, and their religion and motives are being analyzed to the finest detail.
In the meantime, a fertilizer plant has exploded in Texas, killing 14 and injuring 200 more. Although the tragedy was broadly announced, very little information seems to be making its way onto the public airwaves as to what led to this horrific event. Now that we know it wasn’t terrorism, we’ve pretty much let the subject drop.
What is it that is so much more compelling about the first tragedy than the second? Why does it deserve so much more of our national attention and imagination? Far more people were killed in Texas, and the property damage was devastating, pretty much flattening the small town. Their grief is just as real, their first responders just as brave.
There are, I’m sure, many explanations, but I’d suggest that the biggest reason for the different levels of national attention to the two tragedies has to do with a known flaw in the human brain. We are terrible at assessing risk. When we hear of a bombing, we imagine that it could happen to any of us. We see a world in which terrorists lurk behind every bush, and we want to do everything possible to stop the bad guys, and to punish their terrible acts of wrongdoing. When we hear of a factory explosion, it’s just an accident, and something that could not possibly happen to us, since we don’t happen to live next to a fertilizer plant.
But the reality is far different than the flight or fight systems in our brains would have us believe. The risk of terrorism to any given person in the US is infinitesimal. Your risk from a texting driver, a legal gun owner or a lightning strike is higher. Your risk, however, from under-regulated industry, of the type that caused the Texas explosion, the massive oil leaks that happened recently from pipelines in Arkansas and Texas, not to mention the Deepwater Horizon explosion that dumped over 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico as well as claiming the lives of 11 rig workers, is far, far greater. If you consider the subtler incursions of unsafe pesticides, genetically modified foods that may or may not be safe, air and water pollution and so forth, then your exposure to risk starts to approach 100%.
In response to the events of 9/11 and subsequent terrorist acts we have spent trillions of dollars and changed our lifestyles in ways that range from how we board an airplane to who sees our private information. In response to the devastating human and natural costs of under-regulated industries and corporate greed we have…a continued call for less regulation, and less money spent on enforcing the regulations that remain.
If we really cared about addressing real dangers we would have applied the trillions of dollars that have gone to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to developing and promoting renewable energy and fighting the effects of climate change. If we really wanted to make our citizens safe, we would be holding the corporate perpetrators of natural and human disasters responsible, and working to see that safety regulations were followed in a way that would prevent future disasters.
But we are bound to a national narrative that tells us that we can combat the bad guys by putting more guns in the hands of the good guys. We are tied into a story which is so dedicated to supporting the capitalist undertaking that while we are willing to give corporations the free speech rights of individuals, we aren’t willing to hold them responsible the way we would with individuals who had committed equally heinous deeds. We are quick slap the label “evil” on people who commit terrible acts, and even to extend that label to the religious or ethnic groups to which they belong. But we seem to just accept the fact that corporations will do whatever they can to maximize profit, and the costs that all of us must bear are somehow simply the price of doing business.
Sure, I want to know why the Tsarnaev brothers committed their terrible acts of violence. And I get that we are fascinated by the rare individual who commits unimaginable acts for unimaginable reasons. We already know why West Fertilizer Co., and BP and Exxon and so many others allowed terrible things to happen on their watch. And it is that prosaic, everyday pattern of choosing short-term profit over life and health that I find truly terrifying.
We Don’t Know
We don’t know, and we can’t imagine. Who would set bombs to go off at the end of a foot race? Why would any human being do such a thing? What is the world coming to that such acts of violence are beginning to seem commonplace? What sort of beings are we, what sort of a society are we, that wholesale random violence would be an ongoing part of our lives?
We don’t know, and we can’t imagine. And maybe it isn’t such a bad thing to sit with those two facts. We don’t know. And so it does no good to speculate about foreign terrorists or domestic terrorists or mental illness or right-wing or left-wing conspiracies. We don’t know. Maybe by the time you read this, we will. But for the meantime we just have to live with horrible suffering for no known reason. Which is kind of how life is. We don’t know why some people get cancer, or why some babies die in their cribs or why one house is completely demolished by tornado or fire when the one next door is untouched. We just don’t know. You could say it’s God’s will, but usually that’s what the neighbors with the intact house say—“God saved us!”—while their neighbors blankly examine the rubble of what was their home.
We don’t know, and we live in a world of not knowing. Except that we know that brave first responders are tending the wounded and clearing the area of any other explosive devices. We know that people are caring for one another, that shell-shocked bystanders are seeing that the hurt receive medical attention, that people across the country are calling up the Red Cross to see if they should donate blood, that folks everywhere are praying, sending love, wishing for safety and healing. And we know this without witnessing it, without seeing it on the news, simply because that is what people always do. That is who we are.
And who we are is people who can’t imagine. We can’t imagine why someone would commit such a brutal and bloody act because however many times these horrific acts rip across our headlines, 99.99999% of us are the kind of people who not only wouldn’t do such a thing, we are also people who couldn’t even imagine doing it. We might or might not jump in a river in an attempt to save someone who is drowning, but we can imagine it. We might or might not walk onto a busy highway to rescue an injured dog, but we can imagine it. What we can’t imagine is creating wanton destruction, because we are not that kind of people. However many of these horrible, heart-wrenching events happen, they will only be perpetrated by the most infinitesimal fraction of the population, while the rest of us watch and pray and donate blood and do whatever we can to hold safe not only our children and our friends, but also complete strangers whose suffering we can, alas, imagine.
I can’t say whether it’s enough, but it’s how we live in this world.
