Tag: violence

Glimpses of the Kingdom

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This is the second week of Advent, the season of waiting for Christ to come to us in the midst of our darkness. Having spent the last several years getting to know people in poverty and on the margins of society, I am pretty much constantly aware of that darkness, and it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the light altogether. That’s why I want to hold onto any glimpses I catch of the kingdom slowly but surely breaking in, and I want to share a few of them here.

I recently completed a three-month volunteer training with Battered Women’s Support Services here in Vancouver, where my fellow trainees were a group of brave women with beautiful, compassionate hearts. Most of those women don’t identify as people of faith, but I felt the presence of God in the midst of the safe and loving community we built together. That strong sense of community was absolutely vital during the twelve intense weeks we spent staring injustice and violence in the face and sharing some very raw pieces of our own stories.  Exploring the ugliness of the world with a bunch of people who are committed to doing something about it helps keep my hope alive, and reminds me that there is strength in our shared vulnerability as human beings.

I’ve now begun fielding calls on the crisis line. From police to hospitals to courts, it’s been sobering to realize how often the systems that have been set up to protect the vulnerable actually let people slip through the cracks–or worse, further traumatize and isolate them. Sometimes, people struggling with mental health issues are given criminal records instead of help. Sometimes women are arrested for defending themselves against abusive partners while the men who batter them go free. I know this now, not only through statistics or reading articles or listening to experts talk about it, but from speaking to these women on the phone.  All too often, factors such as race, income level, and immigration status determine whether or not a woman will get the help she needs.

Volunteering with BWSS has been a steep learning curve, and the stories of violence and abuse that I have been hearing over the phone are heartbreaking. Yet I also feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the chance to support these brave, resilient women in resisting violence and pursuing lives of dignity and safety.  I am humbled by their tenacity in working against staggering odds to reclaim their own identities and the lives and to heal from trauma.

In other news, I’ve just landed my first paid job in Canada! Yesterday, I accepted a position working directly with refugee claimants: people who have fled their countries of origin because of violence or persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinions or membership in a particular social group. In contrast to privately-sponsored or government-assisted refugees, refugee claimants undertake their dangerous journey without knowing whether or not they will be granted asylum when they reach their destination. They often face detention upon arrival, and the months-long refugee claims process that follows can be a stressful and scary time while claimants struggle to navigate an unfamiliar system, gather evidence for their case, and wait for their fate to be decided by the powers that be.

My job will bring me into contact with families at all stages of this process, but my main responsibility will be to support those whose refugee claims have recently been approved, journeying alongside them as they begin the process of integrating into the local community and helping them to find employment.

I start tomorrow, and I can’t wait. In the face of all the violence and hateful rhetoric lately, I am beyond thrilled to be able to extend the welcome of Christ to refugee claimants from around the world—Muslim and otherwise—who have come to this country seeking safety. I look forward to all of the beautiful people I will meet, and to all the ways they are sure to challenge and humble me and force me to grow, causing me to see more (and differently) than I did before.

I give thanks for every step a woman takes towards freedom and safety. I give thanks for every refugee’s safe arrival, and every successful application for asylum.  I celebrate every small victory for justice in our world, and I recognize Christ’s coming in our midst. Still, I wait impatiently in the dark, willing these pin-prick stars to turn into daylight.

God, be born in our hearts. In our fractured world, let us be the midwives of goodness and truth coming into being.

The Charleston Church Shooting Is Nothing New

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grief

photo credit: nola.com

Two days ago, a young white man gunned down nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

When confronted with such a brutal, violent act, it is tempting to dismiss the killer as an anomaly—mentally ill or emotionally disturbed, perhaps—instead of recognizing the roots of his behavior in the shared history, culture, and institutions of our society. But viewing these murders as an isolated incident obscures their connection to a larger pattern of racial violence that is as old as the United States of America.

I recently read the memoir of a lawyer named Bryan Stevenson who spent years working to free innocent men on death row, and advocating for children and individuals with mental illness or intellectual disabilities who are serving life sentences or awaiting execution. His book Just Mercy is a heartbreaking look at mass incarceration and extreme punishment in America, and his decades of personal involvement in the criminal justice system reveal the blatant influence of race in determining how Americans are treated by police, courts of law, and prison authorities.

Stevenson illuminates the concrete effects of racism on the lives of black Americans by explaining “four institutions in American history that have shaped our approach to race and justice”:

  1. Slavery. African Americans were considered property rather than human beings with rights.
  1. The “Reign of Terror” between Reconstruction and World War II. After 9/11, it was common to hear news anchors and politicians alike referring to this attack as the first time Americans had experienced terrorism within our own country. But as Stevenson explains, the fear of violence was nothing new for African Americans who grew up in the South between the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. As one man told him, “We grew up with terrorism all the time. The police, the Klan, anybody who was white could terrorize you. We had to worry about bombings and lynchings, racial violence of all kinds.” Stevenson argues that “America’s embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt redirect the violent energies of lynching while assuring white southerners that black men would still pay the ultimate price.” Today, the pairing of a black perpetrator with a white victim still results in the death penalty more often than crimes involving a white perpetrator or a black victim.
  1. Segregation and human rights violations under “Jim Crow.” The Supreme Court didn’t strike down laws against interracial marriage until 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, but marriage between whites and blacks remained illegal under the Alabama state constitution until the year 2000 (and even then, 41% of Alabama voters cast their ballots in favor of upholding the ban). In 1945, Stevenson points out, “the Supreme Court upheld a Texas statute that limited the number of black jurors to exactly one per case,” and after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, many southern states continued to exclude African Americans from serving on juries at all.
  1. Mass incarceration today. The United States has the highest rates of incarceration of anywhere in the world, and the vast majority of the 2.3 million people currently in prison are black or brown. People of color are often arrested and sentenced for the kind of nonviolent drug offenses that white teenagers and college students engage in without consequence, and frequent police harassment increases the likelihood of black and Latino teenagers developing criminal records. Stevenson argues (as did Michelle Alexander in her 2010 book, The New Jim Crow) that mass incarceration functions to control and disenfranchise African Americans in much the same way that Jim Crow did in the past. Some states permanently take away the right to vote from anyone with a criminal conviction, which means that there are now several states in which a higher percentage of African American men are barred from voting now than were disenfranchised before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

These institutions stretch from the birth of the American nation down to today, showing that racism is not an imagined problem, a historical phantom long since put to rest, or the extreme ideology of some fringe individuals in society. Racism is embedded in our history, our culture, and our civic institutions. It’s not something that will fade out automatically—it’s a glaring problem that all of us need to confront as a nation and in our own hearts and minds.

Recognizing our fears or ignorance about people who are unlike us does not make us bad or hateful people. If we want to walk in the truth and to love our neighbors well, then we must be willing to acknowledge the ways we subtly buy into untrue assumptions about people of other races, or support policies and institutions which negatively impact their lives. An ongoing process of critical self-reflection is necessary for anyone who wants to live a just and compassionate life, and it is especially important for those of us in the racial majority who have never experienced discrimination.

In the wake of yet another tragedy, I am grieving with the families of the slain. But grieving is not enough. White America has two choices: we can continue to look away from the festering wound of racism in our society, or we can confront our past and our present in order to pursue a different future on the basis of truth and reconciliation.

India is honest

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A friend from Australia, visiting India for the second time, remarked that compared to his own country, India is very honest—honest in the sense that when you’re here, you can have no illusions about the injustice and suffering around you. It’s right in your face: income disparity, discrimination, sexism, poverty, disease. Rich and poor meet on the street, where wealthy men in their big SUVs bully and sometimes run over the poor men on bicycles. The rich and poor interact daily in homes, where the wealthy pay a pittance to impoverished servants who cook, clean, and sometimes even raise the children of the wealthy without ever gaining their respect.  The powerful abuse the weak in every arena of life: men harass and rape women, influential families bribe the cops to get away with land grabbing, murder, and everything in between; police and lawyers alike extort poor families for money with threats of their loved ones being indefinitely imprisoned otherwise. People make no secret of their dislike for dark skin and openly discriminate in marriage, the work place, and the community based on skin color. Restaurants and factories openly use child labor to create everything from furniture to motorcycles to potato curry.All of these power dynamics, and all of the suffering that results from it, are disturbing to watch. People’s arrogance, self-importance, prejudice, and blatant disregard for other human beings is infuriatingly obvious in the most routine daily interactions of Indian life. But my Aussie friend is right that there is something refreshing about at least having it out in the open. In our home countries, the child labor that goes into our home furnishings and wardrobe is hidden away in factories on the other side of the world, far away from the air-conditioned malls and classy stores where we actually buy our stuff. The disparity between the wealthiest and poorest members of our society has never been higher, but the spheres of the rich and poor are separate enough to keep them from ever interacting with each other: rich people don’t take the bus, poor people don’t go to private school, and poverty is contained in certain neighborhoods whereas wealth is contained in certain other neighborhoods—usually neighborhoods with gates or at least with a buffer zone of several miles of carefully landscaped distance between them and the nearest depressed area.

And so our prejudices remain intact, but we’re too tactful to voice them most of the time.

We hide them, even from ourselves.

Our politics are perfect, utterly correct, when it comes to language.

At least, usually this is how it is. But then a white police officer shoots a black teenager and then even if you don’t consider the event itself to be indicative of any larger problem, it’s impossible to observe the aftermath of the shooting and deny that our country has a race problem. The underlying fear and alienation that’s been there all along bubbles up to the surface: an entire [black] community rises up, refusing to consent any longer to a well-armed authority structure that has never had their interests at heart. The [white] police respond by declaring war on the community, betraying the deep-seated fear they have harbored all along of these people they consider sub-human; voicing aloud the belief that they are “f***ing animals” who have never deserved the full protection of the law anyway.

I find it ironic that so many people whose conservative leanings would generally lead them to denounce big government, expansion of government power, and any infraction of citizen’s rights have automatically sided with a police officer acting as judge, jury, and executioner of an unarmed teenager in a stunning corruption of the legal system as we know it. Furthermore, they continue to side with heavy-handed state violence against ordinary citizens exercising  their democratic right to protest.

I find it depressing that so many people whose Christianity should generally lead them to feel compassion and to side with the oppressed have instead sided with the oppressor, not only pontificating judgmentally and heartlessly about the character of the victim and how his execution was likely deserved (due to a $50 theft), but also condemning the community’s reaction to this unjust situation instead of calling out the injustice for what it is.

I think the reason for these strange reversals of loyalty in both cases is that the deepest loyalty actually lies along fault lines of race rather than religion or politics. If a white teenager had been killed, and if the protests were happening in a wealthy white suburb, then things would be different. Suspicion and judgment would fall on the murderer and not the murder victim. Sympathy would lie with the grieving family and their community rather than with the state apparatus. If the guns and the tear gas and the armored vehicles were pointed at “us” and not at “them”, then we would be quicker to recognize this as the blatant, evil, violent abuse of power that it is. The killer would be awaiting criminal trial instead of enjoying paid administrative leave from work.

When we look at how quickly this one man’s death has escalated into police firing tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of peaceful protestors from the safety of an armored vehicle, and protestors responding with rocks and now Molotov cocktails and bullets of their own, we realize that this didn’t start with Michael Brown. It didn’t even start with Trayvon Martin, though the blatant miscarriage of justice in that case certainly reinforced the message that the system—police, courts, public opinion—will automatically operate with a racial bias towards protecting and believing whites over blacks. This is part of a legacy of fear, hatred, and separation that is as old as our country, and it is a disease that will continue to plague our society until we decide to face the beast by exploring the dark fears and prejudices in own hearts, even and especially the ones we are not fully aware of. Healing ourselves and our nation will require admitting the ignorance on which so many of our attitudes and ideas are based, because we have been so busy justifying ourselves and defending our establishment to ever truly listen to and engage with the experience of the Other. As a white woman, I don’t believe that most of us white Americans have ever truly acknowledged the race situation in our country. We are too eager to “move on” with history, to sweep the sins of the past under the rug and encourage everyone to simply pretend that there are not still festering wounds and real-life, still-unfolding consequences of everything that has gone on before.

Many people have angrily pointed out the violence of some of the protestors in Ferguson, implying that perhaps Michael Brown had it coming because he was just as violent, or that this behavior demonstrates how  inherently violent the black community is and how their complaints are therefore invalid. It’s true that if demonstrations had remained entirely peaceful, they could have been an even more powerful witness to injustice by throwing the violence of the police into the sharp relief against the defenseless and brave confrontation of unarmed protestors. I am saddened that a few community members have muddied the waters by turning to violence as their expression of grief and anger, because paradoxically it is they—the powerless ones, the ones who have been wronged—who actually hold the power to transform the situation. The right to extend forgiveness and thus break the cycle of evil is theirs and theirs alone.

But don’t think for a moment that the violent actions of a few individuals invalidate the grief and anger of this entire community against injustice. They—and we—should be furious about the slaying of an unarmed black man for no apparent reason. We should remember that it was the systematized, unchallenged violence and disdain of the mostly-white police department over several decades that provoked the current violence in Ferguson.

To quote Paulo Freire, “Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, or unrecognized… It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the ‘rejects of life’… It is not the despised who initiate hatred, but those who despise. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate men, but those who denied that humanity… For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed (whom they obviously never call ‘the oppressed’…) who are disaffected, who are ‘violent’, ‘barbaric’, ‘wicked’, or ‘ferocious’ when they react to the violence of the oppressors.” –Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 41

As a white American, I have been disturbed by the fear, suspicion, and anger that many other white people have been expressing on social media over the past several days. I am saddened by the knowledge that Michael Brown’s death, which should be a wake-up call for us to address the root issues of violence and alienation in our society, has instead become an occasion for rallying around the people who are like us. We are becoming more closed, more angry, less willing to listen, less willing to admit our own conscious and unconscious role in creating this broken, sinful, segregated society. Laws have been passed and progress has been made towards equality, but we still have a long way to go in this country if we are seeking racial reconciliation. Legal reform won’t take us the rest of the way, because the violence and separation that remains is within our own hearts and minds, and within our continuing isolation from one another. We continue in our unwillingness to suspend judgment long enough to enter into the experience and perspective of the people who aren’t like us. We’re too afraid of their anger (and perhaps too afraid of our own guilt or the awkwardness of dealing with strong, wounded emotions) to even hear them out.

I grew up in an upper-middle class white suburb, so I had very few black people in my life growing up. In college I had a few black friends and even attended a mostly black church for awhile, but with this limited experience I still cannot claim to know the first thing about what it’s like to be black in America. I have also lived for several years in cross-cultural situations in which I am the racial and cultural minority, but the color of my skin has always worked in my favor, commanding instant interest and respect. If I have ever been stereotyped, it has usually been as someone more qualified, educated, or wealthy than I actually am. I don’t know what it’s like for my skin color to work against me; to automatically trigger suspicion, fear, or disrespect.

If your background is at all similar to mine, then you share my ignorance.  It’s time for us to be honest about what we don’t know, to ask others to teach us, and to be willing to shut up and listen when they do.

As limited human beings with particular sets of experience, we all start off being ignorant of what lies beyond our own immediate field of vision. Taking on our society’s subtle assumptions, stereotypes, and prejudices as children is entirely natural, unavoidable, and doesn’t make us bad people. Moral decision only comes in when we begin to realize our ignorance. Then we have a choice: either remaining as we are, covering our ears, closing our eyes, or talking over others to claim that we already know; or opening our minds and our hearts to others in the humble admission that we do not know, that there are things about which we are wrong. We have the choice to be willing to learn, and to change.

The more tightly we hold onto the belief that we can already see, the more blind we become.

For my Muslim sisters and brothers in Gaza,                                                             For my Christian sisters and brothers in Iraq and Syria 

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In parts of Syria and Iraq this week, innocent civilians have been raped, murdered, and forced to flee from their homes by a religious fundamentalist group who has issued a chilling ultimatum to this ancient faith community which has resided in the area for centuries: convert, abandon your homes, or die by the sword. Elsewhere in the Middle East, a heavily-armed military continues its merciless bombing of a civilian population, killing hundreds of children in a campaign intended to show that it has no tolerance for agents of “terror” who kill innocent civilians.The first instance of violence has hardly reported in Western media at all, but where the story has gotten out, it has stirred universal condemnation from Americans and especially from Christians. This makes sense, because in the case of Iraq and Syria, the families being murdered in cold blood or fleeing for their lives are Christians, and their attackers are Muslim fundamentalists: a terrorist group known as ISIS. For many American Christians, this seems a clear-cut case of good guys vs. bad guys.In the second instance of families being murdered in cold blood, many Americans and (disturbingly) Christians especially are fully supportive of the state-sponsored violence. This can again be explained in terms of primitive, tribal allegiance: in this case, the civilian casualties are Muslims, and their executioners are members of the Israeli military. Many Christians feel a strong cultural and religious tie to Judaism, and they further extrapolate this kinship with Judaism and Jewish people to extend to the secular political state of Israel. Pretty soon the idea somehow arises that God is on the side of a powerful (although threatened) military state focusing its firepower on what is basically an oversized slum populated with traumatized, displaced people who are being exploited by Hamas. This idea hinges on the implicit assumption that “good guys” and “bad guys” can be separated out along tribal lines: Israelis, good; Palestinians: bad.

God certainly doesn’t take the side of either Israelis or Palestinians, much less Hamas or the Israeli Defense forces!  But God does take sides: He is on the side of the weak against the strong, the oppressed against the oppressor, and grieving, the suffering, and the poor. God takes this side because He cares about the welfare of all people.

It seems to me that most of us have no clarity with which to understand what’s happening in these two arenas of violence or to perceive the connections between them. We lack that clarity because we are still stuck thinking in terms of Muslims vs. Christians or Jews vs. Muslims without noticing that both of these unfolding horror stories are really about human beings using power and violence to control and destroy other human beings. ISIS and Hamas seek to enforce their political agendas through violence and the threat of violence; the Israeli government uses the same strategy (but while claiming the moral high ground): other children must die, for the sake of our children.

The problem here is not Christianity, Judaism, or Islam as religions, but rather fundamentalist justifications of violence within each faith. If we are only willing to recognize the destructive effects of fundamentalism and violence in another religion—say, in Islam— and not in our own, then we merely strengthen our own dark side by ignoring it. We become blind to our own violence and capacity for evil, and that blindness (or state of denial) makes us more dangerous. We have only to take a sidelong glance back into Church history to see the destructive results of such blindness: burning heretics at the stake, conquering and subjugating non-Christian peoples, forcing conversion on threat of death. Sadly, Christians’ unquestioned dependence on violence has led them to act as aggressors and persecutors as often as they have been persecuted victims or peacemakers, all the while presuming to have God’s stamp of approval.

I am not pro-Palestinian. I am not pro-Israel. I don’t believe that the actions of the Israeli government represent all Jewish people any more than I believe that ISIS represents all Muslims, or that Hamas represents all Palestinians. I don’t believe that the dehumanizing, fear-based, reactionary violence of ISIS or Hamas or the Israeli military is worthy of any human being. And I do believe that Jesus is equally represented in the suffering of persecuted Christians, traumatized Palestinians, and kidnapped Israeli teenagers. The labels of race, religion, and nationality are not useful in helping us to see a way forward in these crises, because that is exactly the kind of “us vs. them” thinking that began these messes in the first place.

I am pro-life. And this is my appeal for other Christians to take a pro-life stance in this situation as well, by rejecting the political, religious, and pragmatic justifications for violence that are being made on all sides.

There is much more to talk about concerning the history and specifics of the complex situation in Israel/Palestine, and a detailed examination would only further demonstrate that nobody’s hands are clean; no group can be painted as completely innocent or completely at fault. I haven’t gone into the various documented human rights abuses of either Hamas or the Israeli military here because I believe that the root issue will not be resolved in a meticulous weighing up of one group’s sins against the other, but in a commitment to stop viewing the conflict through a tribal lens that requires taking sides in the first place. Every time that either Israelis or Palestinians have sought to resolve the situation with violence, it has only perpetuated the bloody cycle of killing by creating more fear and hatred. Why go on pursuing this dead-end strategy for “security” or “peace”?

 

Trust Issues

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I was grieved when I saw the news: four children and their parents, murdered in front of each other in their own home, not far from where I grew up. A fifth child, narrowly surviving, witness to the destruction of her entire family. I fought back tears as I made my morning coffee, feeling a rush of emotions, but surprise was not among them. The tragedy is disturbing, of course, but not shocking. If anything this kind of tragedy has become disturbingly and shockingly commonplace.

I know that for many of you this will be a hard word, but please hear me out. I live in a violent neighborhood. People often get kicked, punched, beaten with pieces of metal, knocked unconscious, and even cut with knives during domestic disputes, fights between neighbors, and the self-harm that sometimes results. In the approximately two years that A. and I have lived here, we’ve seen a lot of that violence firsthand, but the death toll from this violence over that same period of time is zero. I would like to say that I can’t imagine how high it would be if people in our neighborhood had access to guns, but the truth is that I can imagine. I imagine that if guns were involved in these interpersonal conflicts, then our neighborhood would more likely resemble the violent slums of Guatemala, or the American inner city where we attended church during university, where gun violence claimed the lives of people in the neighborhood virtually every week. I remember that we once took up a collection at the end of the morning service to pay for the funeral of a young teenager whose grandmother couldn’t afford to bury his body. Another Sunday, we prayed with a man whose younger brother was in the ICU after being hit in a drive-by shooting targeting their apartment complex the night before.

That neighborhood was a lot like the one where we live now: it was a vibrant, complex community which included many wonderful people and networks of relationships, but it was also a place where poverty, addiction, psychological trauma, personal dysfunction, and broken relationships often led to violence. But because the violence in the inner city was usually perpetrated with efficient, lethal weapons that could be used from a distance, rather than with hands or dull peeling knives at close range, it was frequently fatal. Both of these neighborhoods are violent, but the difference between them in terms of loss of life is hard to overstate.

I believe in wholistic approaches to problems, and I have no illusions about a simple change in government policy bringing about wholeness in society. But neither do I have any illusions about the relationship between the prevalence of guns in the United States and the prevalence of gun-related deaths in the United States. Well-reputed scientific studies from Oxford and elsewhere have demonstrated that rather than making a family safer, the presence of a gun in the home increases the risk of violent death in that home. That increased risk has also been proven to exist regardless of what type of gun you own, how many you keep in your house, or how you store them. Americans often keep guns in their homes for the express purpose of making themselves safer, but these guns are statistically used far more often in homicides, suicides, or unintentional shootings than in self-defense. Research also shows that across the country, states with the lowest rates of gun ownership and the strongest gun control legislation have the lowest rates of gun-related deaths in the country while states with the highest rates of gun ownership and the loosest gun control laws have the highest rates of gun-related deaths.

All of this evidence points us to the question: are guns actually making us safer? The evidence also points us to an answer: No.

As a society we need to take a good, hard look at how we have integrated violence into our culture. We accept it as normal and necessary when it comes to “domestic security” in the form of warfare, torture, and executive kill lists, or when it comes to “justice” in terms of the death penalty. We celebrate violence as heroic when it’s sanctioned by the state and committed against people whom we fear and with whom we have nothing in common. But when the violence is turned inward on ourselves—and it is the nature of violence to eventually destroy those who use it is as well as those against whom it is used—we mourn, we are shocked, and our reactionary fear leads us to fortify our defenses against further violence… with more violence.

As a human being, I understand the way that fear triggers irrational, self-protective instincts. But as a Christian, it saddens me that we as a society would rather take our chances in the mode of kill-or-be-killed instead of venturing down the path of enemy love that Jesus blazed for us. We could argue for a long time about which specific legislation or action plans or public policies are needed to make our country safer, and those conversations certainly have their place. But that is not the conversation that I want to have here. I am more interested in the heart of the issue, and the heart issue, as I see it, is our religious faith in violence.

Jesus says, “Do not fear those who kill the body…”

…but we trust more in our capacity for violence than we do in God for our protection.

Jesus says, “Seek first the Kingdom…”

…but we seek first our own physical safety, and the safety of our material possessions.

Jesus says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…”

…but we wait for intruders with deadly weapons under our pillows.

Jesus says, “All who draw the sword will die by the sword…”

…but we are more willing to take that risk than the risk of following our Teacher.

I’m not questioning anyone’s legal right to own a gun. That right is most certainly laid out in the law. What I’m asking is, why is this right to own weapons so important to us? We have the legal right to bear arms, yes, but I believe we also have the freedom to choose to live beyond the condition of violence that results from putting so much trust in arms in the first place. How do we actually want to live?

And ultimately, in whom or what do we put our trust?

Source: New feed

Outsiders

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Around our little perch, rockets explode, shaking our thin brick walls. The smoke is so thick that you can’t see where any of the sounds are coming from, but the crackling and booms coming from the narrow alleyway below sound like they could be directly under our floor. All of this is punctuated with children’s shrieks. But this is not a war; it’s Diwali, and it’s being celebrated the same way it has been for years and years. It’s the same with the festival of Moharram. Deaths, births, weddings, fights, crises, hopes and disappointments come and go, but like a primordial clock ticking, the calendar always swings back around to this day, and everyone puts up the garlands of tinsel and beats the drums and cooks up enormous pots of food over wood fires in the alleyways right on cue. The celebration goes on, come what may.

There can be something comforting and inspiring about this: the discipline of setting aside times for celebration and following through with them knowing that the bad things in life are going to carry on anyway so the party should, too.

There can be something deeply discouraging things about this: the way that outsiders and interventions come and go and yet everything stays the same.

This week, there was an ill-thought-out “medical camp” in our slum that was sponsored by a well-intentioned organization with a hotline people can call to report children who are in distress (abused, abandoned, etc.)  The staff came to offer free medical care for a day and to distribute literature about their group’s services for vulnerable children. Of course, none of the people they were targeting could read the flyers they handed out, and their free medical camp only played into ideas of scarcity as people lined up frantically, regardless of whether or not they were sick at the time. Most of our neighbors have very little understanding about what makes them sick, or about how medicine works—but it does work, sometimes. And who knows when you’ll fall ill again, and whether or not you’ll be able to afford more medicine when it happens? Might as well get some free stuff now to have on hand. Many young children were even lined up to see the doctor all by themselves—which is absurd. How can a five–year-old accurately describe symptoms, understand a diagnosis, or remember which pills to take when and for how long? Medical camps like this one also discourage parents from taking their children to one of several private clinics or public hospitals nearby, and serve as a stop-gap method that delays the real change that is so badly needed to make the existing facilities work.

Nonetheless, one of the staff members’ only job was to run around photographing impoverished children receiving free medical care, and I’m sure that will be quite moving on the group’s website, or in their newsletter, or whatever. But because there’s no follow-up to these kinds of feel-good projects, Child Helpline won’t realize that their credibility in this community was completely destroyed within a few hours of their leaving. Someone had an allergic reaction to one of the medicines she had received from the doctor, and as I rushed to the ER with this panicked woman who was struggling to breathe, her sister was announcing to every person we passed on our way out to the road: “Throw all your medicine away! Those people gave us bad medicine—look what it’s doing to her!” And nearly everyone did—thousands of rupees of medicine, thrown away. And trust of this charitable organization was turned to suspicion and anger, just like that.

But the conundrum didn’t end there. Because when we arrived at the ER and showed them the medicine that she had taken right before beginning to feel mental confusion and her throat and airways tightening up, the interns who were staffing the place without supervision from other doctors promptly gave her an injection that caused a second reaction and sent the woman panicking and literally running out of the hospital, refusing to accept the oxygen mask they wanted to give her with medicine to open up her airways. The medical students assumed that she must be a mental patient and sent her home with a couple of antacids and some pills for anxiety.  I’m ashamed to say that I was inclined to agree with them about anxiety being the cause of her irrational behavior—until we were walking out of the hospital, when I got a second look at the box of medicine she had taken and it dawned on me that the drug they had injected her with was the same one that had caused her allergic reaction in the first place. Having disregarded what she was telling them, the staff at the ER had made the sloppy mistake of trying to “treat” her by giving her a second dose of the medicine she was allergic to.

At 3 a.m. the next morning, when one of our neighbors caught a young teenage boy in the act of breaking into his house to steal, a crowd of angry people quickly formed, mostly people whose homes had also been recently broken into, and we were woken up by the ruckus. There has been a string of such nighttime thefts in our community lately. People here own so little that they are hit hard by the theft of a cell phone, a wad of cash, or merchandise for a small store they run out of their home.  And our neighbors’ poverty ironically makes them especially vulnerable to thieves.  Even though rich people own more that’s worth stealing, they have the means to protect it with guards and gates and high, sturdy walls; the poor may or may not have a door on their shack, or the ladder or staircase going up to the roof may provide a way into their rooms from above. In our neighborhood, most people’s homes are packed so close together that many of the roofs are connected, and without access to bank accounts, a lot of people store their life’s savings in their homes.

So all of that pent up fear and anger about the multiple robberies of the past two weeks was directed against this boy. He was certainly a child in distress, but we feared that the hotline staff’s presence might just stir up more wrath from the community since the memory of the “bad medicine” they had handed out was still fresh on everyone’s minds.  And we knew from past experience that it was a coin toss whether police would escalate the violence or restore peace. Following our desperate attempts to intervene and to reason with the crowd, and a few other voices calling for restraint, another neighbor who felt conflicted about the direction things were headed eventually did call the cops. But the boy was pretty roughed up and humiliated by the time they arrived, and just as everyone had predicted, they did nothing to help. After hauling the kid off to the station, they demanded a bribe from the man whose house had been broken into, and when he refused they simply let the thief go without even filing a report of the incident.

It’s no wonder that people take the law into their own hands when there’s no higher authority to appeal to for help. And I shudder to think what kind of situation this poor child is going back into… probably back into the custody of adults who force him to risk his life to steal for them by climbing into houses at night, through the holes too small for them to fit through themselves. The police are as much to blame for this situation as the thieves themselves.

The next day, fears of theft continued but everyone went on with life as usual, and people prepared for the festival. They beat the drums. They hung up decorations. They held a community event in the square where the thief had been tied to a pole and interrogated the night before. It seems that the outsiders who interact with our community—the social workers, the loan sharks, the politicians, the police—either come in with open contempt for the people here, wearing contempt and indifference on their sleeve, or else arrive as “helpers” harboring a more subtle form of disdain that manifests as pity and condescension.  It’s as though none of these people speak the language of the locals, even though their attempts to communicate are made in Hindi. Meanwhile, the people who live here know that they can’t trust doctors, or charities, or government officials, or police—but for them this is nothing new. They’re used to that. And so they don’t set much stock by what any of those people say. The only people they can depend on are each other. They stick to what they know, and nothing ever changes.

Being outsiders ourselves, but wanting to carve out a completely novel role for ourselves, leaves us with a very thin place to stand. We have white faces and foreign passports and Hindi is not our first language, so we will never be able to dissolve into our neighbors’ society as completely as we would like. But it’s clear that whatever slow change we hope to catalyze, we won’t be able to do it as outsiders—or at least, we will have to be a very different kind of outsider than people have encountered before: the kind who are interested in listening and learning from people on the inside, and the kind who are willing to stick around long enough to become quasi-insiders ourselves.

A new year begins…

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view from the train window, somewhere in Madhya Pradesh

 

          We rang in the new year on a cold railway station platform in the middle of the night, waiting for an 11 pm train which finally arrived at 2 am.  An overnight train and an all-day bus ride later, we found ourselves in a small town in the hills of Madhya Pradesh, where we spent the next four days praying, resting, and venturing out into nature to hike. It was a welcome reprieve for our souls: sunny days in the wild under the big blue dome of the sky, instead of the cold, grey days we had been having in the city, with the clouds hanging like a low ceiling over the rising smoke of plastic and wood fires our neighbors were lighting everywhere to keep warm.  After experiencing so much of the ugliness and grime of the world, we needed to sit in a garden, surrounded by trees and flowers and birds that reminded us there is beauty in the world.  We needed this quiet, peaceful place to pray and think about God and suffering and resurrection and what it all means for us now, living in the world that is groaning for the transformation that is still out of reach.  We felt truly rested after our time there.
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a view from one of our hikes

 

          But on another cold platform at another train station on our way back, we came across a baby lying on the floor, seemingly abandoned. The shop owner who was standing within inches of the infant carrying on his business vaguely told us upon inquiry that the baby belonged to someone vaguely “over there”. We couldn’t see anyone, and after having ascertained that this guy actually had no idea who the parents were or where they had gone, we took the shivering infant into our arms and wondered what to do next. People seemed surprised at this, and other bystanders began to offer bits of information about a “husband and wife problem” and an argument during which the couple had left the baby and gone outside. Apparently lots of people had seen what happened, but no one had felt responsibility for the child lying helplessly on the cold ground while they bought snacks, sold bottled water, or sat waiting for their trains.  A moment later, a woman in a sari came hurrying down the platform. “Oh, that’s her,” the shop keeper motioned vaguely. As she approached, we saw that blood was flowing down the side of her head and dripping onto the platform.  Too shocked to think of anything to say, I wordlessly handed the baby to the bleeding woman.  Too embarrassed to look anyone in the eye, she wordlessly took him and walked back in the same direction from which she had come.  “Yes, husband and wife problem,” a man standing near me re-affirmed.  “No,” I retorted. “Husband problem.” We were sickened by the collective passivity of everyone throughout the situation, and by the total lack of compassion for either mother or child. Going outside could only have meant that this woman was probably beaten on a crowded street instead of in a crowded train station.
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weekly market in town

 

          Back home, we found our community much as we had left it nearly a week before, except much colder. There is beauty here too, in the warm welcome of our neighbors, some of children’s excitement at our return, and the invitation to drink hot chai around an open fire in our friends’ room.  But temperatures are dipping into the thirties at night now, and some of the animals (not to mention people) aren’t faring too well. There was a cow on the alleyway behind us who could understand Hindi and tell the future. Well, we never quite figured out whether she truly had some strange ability or whether her handler had somehow trained her how to respond appropriately to pretty much any yes or no question you can think of, but she did seem to know more than the average cow. This week two cows, including that strange creature, have succumbed to the cold. And this whole story would just be a bizarre side note if it weren’t for the fact that two families depended on those cows for their livelihood and will now be scrambling to find work in the midst of a cold season during which much of the community’s other work—furniture making and recycling collection—drastically slows down anyway.
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natural beauty was everywhere

 

          Life here is just so full to bursting that within the same day you can find yourself laughing with abandon, hot with rage, struck with curiosity or wonder, and later sad enough to cry (and maybe you do). This week was a little slice of everything, with the confusion, the disappointment, the joy, and the downright strangeness all thrown in together, the way real life always is.
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mother monkey crossing the road with baby in tow