Glass Parking Lots
Who hasn’t heard some overzealous potbellied “patriot” espouse a foreign policy that amounts to genocide by way of the Stars and Stripes? While getting my hair cut at a local barber shop recently, I heard someone say “if we’d have turned that place [insert Middle Eastern locale here] into a glass parking lot, we wouldn’t still be dealing with this.” Whatever this is. The place they typically wish to nuke is as far from their understanding as their hairlines are from where they used to be.
How can someone wish wholesale destruction on a place they’ve never even been? With unbridled bravado, people will wish death on complete strangers without a second thought. Believe it or not, there are some amazing people in those places. Some of the most devout religious people you’ve ever met. Sure, we may disagree on the tenants of our preferred theology or cultural ideals, but the average person in those war-torn places is no different than you or I. They just want to live and provide for their families. I imagine the same is true for those with the unguided rhetoric.
If we take our xenophobic hats off for one millisecond, we would recognize the actions of a few practitioners of said religion or culture don’t, or shouldn’t, represent the people as a whole. It would be no different than all Christian’s being judged by the actions of Greg Locke or the Westboro Baptist Church. They know the book and verse but the love of God is far from their venomous lips. I would hope to think the same can be said of those we deemed as enemies because someone told us to. Their chants of “death to America” likely are equally misguided as our counter chants.
If I lean further into the religious angle here and use a trope from the 90s…WWJD? What Would Jesus Do. Even if you don’t subscribe to Christianity, you have heard his teachings on loving one another and making peace where applicable. We are told to love our enemies and be good Samaritans, not wish death on strangers. Surely, he wouldn’t condone murdering the innocent in retribution. We are all measured equally in the end, and all of us have fallen short of the glory of God. So, in that light we are all equally condemned. The irony is God sent a prophet to that exact region of the world a millennia ago. Just like my fellow patron in the barber shop, Jonah had a serious problem with “those people.” He fled God’s command. He went as far away as he possibly could. He couldn’t and wouldn’t see that the “others” were also equally as deserving of God’s grace as he was.
How many times have we let our anger or cultural indifference sentence people to death. Whether it be by cheering drone strikes or just by refusing to identify certain cultures as human; we are all guilty if we’re being honest. Sometimes our outrage and desire for vengeance is justified, or at least understandable, like in the cases of Pearl Harbor or 9/11, but only when aimed at the correct perpetrators. In the case of 9/11 we somehow leaped from Saudis to Iraqis, but that’s a story for another day.
I’m not here to judge anyone. I found myself getting caught up in the American thirst for blood after we were attacked. I wanted nothing more than to make them, whoever they were, pay for what they did to us, whoever we are. Although I’ll never forget that day, we have more than repaid blood for blood in the twenty years that followed. We learned by having boots on the ground that in many cases the people wanted the same freedoms we did, and at the end of the day just wanted to be left alone to live life as they saw fit. We likely created more “terrorists” than we ever killed anyway, just by our very presence in their countries. I don’t blame them; I imagine I’d have felt the same way if a foreign force was stationed in my back yard. They didn’t have many easy choices with fundamentalists on one side and outsiders on the other.
The relative peace we find ourselves in as a country scares the hell out of me. This is a new phenomenon since my entire adult life, and much of my youth, we were at war with one country or another. We are currently funding a proxy war with Russia by way of Ukraine, and boomers still remembering the Cold War have started repeating those glass parking lot mantras again. Fear is a great motivator at times to do the most abhorrent things, even just in speech. I’m no hippie, but seeing who we can become during seasons of war, I just hope we remember that the “others” are people too. Maybe one day we will realize that we’re all humans. To quote George Santayana “only the dead have seen the end of war.” I hope he’s wrong and I hope our parking lots stay paved with concrete or asphalt.
And that's the gospel!!