Black. White. Cops. Snipers. Muslims. Gays. Innocents.
Guilty. Dallas. Orlando. Ferguson. Paris. Boston. New Town. Virginia Tech…
They roll by in soundbite ribbons
at the bottom of screens. They pop up in newsfeeds as we see what our friends
are up to. The next day, they glare crookedly out of glass-fronted boxes,
daring us to spend a few hard-earned quarters on an actual newspaper.
I wonder what our
great-grandfathers would have thought about that?
The headlines, not the newspapers.
A world where fifty people can die in a day—that’s nothing. In 1911, 126 people
died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. 130 died in
1944 Chicago as a result of a natural gas explosion that leveled a square mile
of the city. Over six thousand died in the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. And
that doesn’t include the wars. But a world where individuals can kill others
just for being different—en masse and
at random—what kind of a world does that look like?
The normal one, actually. Those who
lament about such crimes, such unheard-of atrocities, really betray their
ignorance, or perhaps more charitably, their innocence. The fear of the
unknown, of the different, of the outsider—these drove most of human
civilization. For in most places and times, the guiding motive in relationships
with outsiders was one of suspicion and hostile distrust. Love your enemy?
Please. Be realistic. Protect the tribe! Defend the clan! Guard the city! The
foreigner, the barbarian, the infidel, the gypsy—it was safer to be rid of
them. Banish them. Kill them. In the city square or the battlefield if you can,
in the dead of night or the alley if you can’t. And the guns? Please. That’s a
pretty merciful way to go. They used to use swords. Nooses. Or bonfires. Hitler
is famous, not because his goals were a new idea, but because he figured out how to
accomplish them in the scientific-industrial manner—cleanly, efficiently, and
wholesale. Before that you had to do messy genocide like the Assyrians.
When faced with those who are
different from you, the natural result is to assume that something is wrong
with the other guy. I’m a white middle-class Harvard businesswoman from the
suburbs, so it must be the black boy’s fault. I’m a fatherless, abandoned kid
whose mother won’t stay off drugs, just trying to survive in a hostile world,
so it must be the cop’s fault. I’m a teenager who after a lifetime of ennui and
purposelessness finally finds something that demands total commitment and
promises total reward, so, as the Prophet said, it must be infidel America’s fault.
All three of these can grow up in the same city, root for the same ball team,
even go to the same supermarket—and in a very real sense speak totally
different languages. Try the word America
out for starters. What does that mean for each of them? Opportunity?
Oppression? The Great Satan?
And lo, secularism claimed that it
could reach past that language barrier, that through education, or societal
improvement, or some other fifty billion dollar program it could remake brutal man
into a naturally loving cooperative, where being different was appreciated, not
feared. The lion could lie down with the lamb, Muhammadan with lesbian, police
chief with junkie. All those differences really didn’t matter (unless you were
trying for a scholarship or government position.) The Federation of Star Trek in real life.
Fifty years (perhaps more) later,
here we are. Kill the pigs. Deep six the sodomites. Allahu akbar.
If you suppress the differences,
they pop out eventually. If you magnify them, you can’t get anything done.
Catch-22, secularism. So much for the brotherhood of man. You can’t even figure
out how to define one of those anymore, anyway.
People don’t ever naturally love
what is different. That’s a Hollywood myth, reinforced by cute pictures of
‘innocent’ children playing on the same playground. The pictures that don’t
ever show you the playground bully or the name-calling. Rogers and Hammerstein
were wrong: you don’t “have to be
carefully taught.” We just like to love... what’s just like us.
And then a man came into the world.
He was like us in every way except one: his love went where it wasn’t supposed
to go. Gentiles. Tax collectors. Rich fat cats with education. Poor prostitutes
with none. Warmongers. Bottom-class laborers. Outsiders—and insiders. Dark men from Ethiopia. Light men from Rome. He loved
them all so much that it threatened the very existence of order, and so they
killed him outside their city as a troubler of the peace. Someone had to pay, and it was his fault.
And then he kept coming back.
Greeks started eating with Jews. Rich men sat with poor men on the first day of
the week. The woman who could give tuppence was valued as much as the man who
gave talents of gold. He was the countryman, he was the urban nobleman. He was
everywhere. So they killed him again. And again. And again. It was his fault
the city fell, that the plague came, that the harvest was poor. Justice was
done. His fault.
Finally they gave in through sheer
exhaustion. They watched as the lion laid down with the lamb, as unity of mind,
sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind became commonplace.
Oh, there were hiccups, flare-ups, occasional imbalances. But eventually
everyone got so accustomed to this state of affairs that after a millennium,
they assumed it was normal, the base state of mankind.
But it’s not. That kind of unity
only comes when we can look not at but through our differences to something
beyond. But what? An abstract “brotherhood of man” will only cut it for the
mushy, imaginative, often gullible ones. A lofty government that can force you
to love at the point of a bayonet will only appeal to the greedy ones who love
power. Even the other religions won’t love everybody the same, not if they want
to remain unchanged and consistent. Women, heathen, the unenlightened, the
unborn, the old, the unfit—somebody has to pay. It’s their fault.
But it’s our fault. We did it. The
Triangle Trade. Auschwitz. Boston. Orlando. Dallas. But that man who loved in the wrong places took
the blame. Justice was done. We’re not guilty. And so we have nothing left to
protect, and nothing left to hate in the others. Here is unity. We speak the
same language, with the same Word, behold, we are one people, and we have all
one language, and this is only the beginning of what we can do. And nothing
that we are commanded to do will now be impossible for us.
Change the “normal” world. Love
God. Love your neighbor.
