“The
Time of the End is the Time of No Room”*
By George
Capaccio
December
24, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
Daffy
Donald proposes to
ban Muslims from entering the U.S., while
journalist Glen Greenwald recently reported on the
frightening
upsurge in attacks on Muslims. As I write these
words, I am listening to John Williams’ score for
the movie “Schindler’s List.” The music never fails
to move me deeply. Whatever historical flaws or
misrepresentations the film might have, the
undeniable suffering of the Jewish people, along
with millions of political dissidents and other
“undesirable” human beings—the Untermenschen
in Nazi parlance—is an escapable part of our
history. And now the fascists and neo-Nazis among us
aim to reawaken the very same mentality that led to
the unimaginable cruelty and barbarity of their
predecessors during World War II.
What is
particularly distressing in this recent outbreak of
blind prejudice among a growing number of my fellow
Americans is their apparent ignorance of our
country’s role in generating the humanitarian crises
affecting Syria, Iraq and other Islamic countries in
North Africa and the Middle East. Were it not for
our almighty benevolence and exceptional commitment
to bringing democracy to the oppressed and
downtrodden, an untold number of innocent human
beings would still be with us, here on Earth, living
their lives, practicing their faith, loving and
being loved. But our savage, power-driven, myopic
leaders insist on carrying out their interventions,
always according to God’s plan or some equally
demented design formulated in think tanks and board
rooms and the halls of Congress with the noble goals
of regime change and absolute control of energy
resources firmly in mind.
As it was in
Iraq so it is now in Syria and other targets of the
greatest empire that has ever disgraced the Earth
and all we share in common, like the right to life,
the right to liberty, the right to freedom from
foreign hubris and its many forms—from outright
aggression to the “responsibility to protect.” I’ll
say it again: Were it not for the machinations and
criminal conspiracies of our damnable leaders—from
Bush the First to Obama the Sun King—there would be
no flood of refugees seeking solace and safety on
our shores or the shores of our European brethren.
Perhaps it is worth reminding ourselves, from time
to time, of the words inscribed on Lady Liberty’s
immemorial bronze plaque:
Give me your
tired, your poor,
Your huddled
masses, yearning to breathe free,
The wretched
refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these,
the homeless, tempest tost to me,
I lift my lamp
beside the golden door.
Those words
ring out as an abiding welcome, a sign and signal to
all who seek shelter and safety, no matter their
color, race or creed. It is decidedly not a “No
trespassing, police take notice” sign. Nor does it
say “Irish need not apply” or “No coloreds” or for
that matter, “Muslims keep out!” But Trump and his
followers would have us believe our safety and
security are contingent upon reverting to
discrimination and the building of actual walls and
other, even more formidable barriers constructed of
fear, ignorance and bias of the most negative sort.
They would have us extinguish the torch blazing in
Liberty’s upraised hand, close our borders and
harden our hearts against the thousands of refugees
streaming from the very lands we have, in recent
years, either invaded outright or where proxy forces
and mercenaries have done our dirty work.
And now,
thanks in no small part to the violence we have
inflicted or otherwise instigated upon targeted
countries, the world is faced with the largest
refugee crisis since World War II when an estimated
60 million Europeans became refugees over the course
of the war. Today, according to the UNHCR’s annual
Global Trends Report: World at War, “worldwide
displacement [is] at the highest level ever
recorded…the number of people forcibly displaced at
the end of 2014 had risen to a staggering 59.5
million compared to 51.2 million a year earlier and
37.5 million a decade ago.”
The Report further concludes that the war in Syria
is now the main driver of displacement: “Every
day last year on average 42,500 [Syrians] became
refugees, asylum seekers, or internally displaced, a
four-fold increase in just four years.” Of course,
the foreign policies and misadventures of the United
States is not the only reason why we are facing a
refugee crisis of such magnitude. Again, according
to the UNHCR report:
“…in region
after region, the number of refugees and internally
displaced people is on the rise. In the past five
years, at least 15 conflicts have erupted or
reignited: eight in Africa…three in the Middle East
(Syria, Iraq, and Yemen); one in Europe (Ukraine)
and three in Asia (Kyrgyzstan, and in several areas
of Myanmar and Pakistan). ‘Few of these crises have
been resolved and most still generate new
displacement,’ the report noted, adding that in 2014
only 126,800 refugees were able to return to their
home countries—the lowest number in 31 years.”
The Global
Trends report also includes one more sobering fact:
over half of the refugees in the world today are
children. Like Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old
Syrian child who, with his older brother Galip and
their mother Rehan, died when the boat they shared
with other Syrian refugees capsized while trying to
reach Greece and eventually Canada. In September, a
heart-wrenching photo of Aylan’s lifeless body on
the shore of a Turkish beach made headlines around
the world.
And yet,
despite the outpouring of sympathy for Aylan and the
saturated media coverage of his tragic death and the
plight of thousands of other refugees risking their
lives on dangerous ocean crossings, the root causes
of the refugee crisis remain on the margins of
corporate media. Instead, we must suffer daily
accounts of atrocities committed by ISIS or some Al
Qaeda franchise in Syria or Iraq, and listen to this
or that pundit weighing in on the application of
force to the job of ridding the world of Islamic
fanatics. Is the U.S. blameworthy for waging a
merely half-hearted air war instead of pulling out
all the stops and bombing the hell out of the
terrorists and their command infrastructure? Is
Russia’s game-changing intercession in the form of
strategic bombers and cruise missiles hitting
Islamic State targets putting the final nail in the
coffin of the so-called Caliphate? These and
comparable questions seem to be taking up much of
the news and commentary these days in regard to the
wars in Syria and Iraq.
Even the
Quaker Meeting I attend is not immune to the
seductive lure of an ever more violent response to
the violence of ISIS and its affiliates. The Sunday
after the massacre in Paris, various members, some
of them seasoned Quakers, rose to address the
Meeting. Each in her own way was struggling to
understand how the shooters, presumably aligned with
ISIS, could have murdered so many innocent people in
cold blood. Granted, most of the speakers prefaced
their remarks by reminding us that, as Quakers, we
are committed to nonviolence in the pursuit of
peace. But others, equally appalled by the horror of
what happened in Paris and the growing malignancy of
extremism, confessed that in their darkest moments,
they felt a military response was more than
justified. The threat posed by ISIS, they said, is
so great that only a powerful alliance, similar to
the one that defeated Germany in World War II, could
rescue humanity from extremist violence in all its
manifestations.
Despite
sincere expressions of grief for the latest victims,
no one at the Meeting seemed willing to acknowledge
our own government’s role in turning the Middle East
into a charnel house. The U.S., with its “coalition
of the willing,” is arguably the main driver of this
bloodshed. And no matter which side in these
bewildering conflicts has caused the greater amount
of suffering, the result is the tragic displacement
of millions of desperate, frightened people.
The Gospels
tell the story of Mary and Joseph’s journey from
Nazareth to Bethlehem to register for a census.
According to the traditional narrative, the couple
found the Judean equivalent of “no vacancy” at
whatever lodging they came to. (Some Biblical
scholars question this account; they argue that,
given the social mores of first century Palestine,
it’s highly unlikely that a woman on the verge of
giving birth would be turned away. A more credible
interpretation is that a guest room in a private
home was unavailable, and therefore, Mary and Joseph
were taken to the “manger,” a small area built into
the floor of Middle Eastern homes where a peasant
family’s farm animals would spend the night.)
The late poet,
author, mystic and Trappist monk Thomas Merton
composed in 1965
"The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room,"*
a Christmas meditation whose musings are, I believe,
as relevant today as they were those many years ago.
I imagine Merton writing these words while
enthralled, perhaps, by the mystery and beauty of
this holiest of seasons and, more to the point,
moved by the suffering and injustice he had
witnessed:
Into this
world, this demented inn, in which there is
absolutely no room
for Him at
all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He
cannot be at
home in it,
because He is out of place in it, His place is with
those others
for whom there
is no room. His place is with those who do not
belong,
who are
rejected by power because they are regarded as weak,
those
who are
discredited, who are denied the status of persons,
who are
tortured,
bombed, and exterminated. With those for whom there
is no
room, Christ
is present in the world. He is mysteriously present
in those
for whom there
seems to be nothing but the world at its worst …
With
these He
conceals Himself, In these He hides Himself, for
whom there is
no room.
—
Raids
on the Unspeakable
A recent (and
to my mind, representative) example of a belligerent
and wholly inhospitable response to the plight of
refugees is an illustration by a
Japanese “manga” artist. She apparently used the
actual photo of a 6-year-old Syrian girl in a
Lebanese camp as the basis of her
drawing, which appeared on Facebook. The
Japanese text that appears in the background of the
drawing is intended to reveal the child’s inner
musings:
“I want to live a safe and clean life, have a
gourmet meal, go out freely, wear pretty things and
luxuriate. I want to live my life the way I want
without a care in the world — all at the expense of
someone else…. I have an idea. Why don’t I become a
refugee?”
In my own
life, I have been fortunate, or rather blessed, to
have encountered quite a few “refugees.” In 2009, I
spent time in Amman meeting with Iraqi families and
listening to the stories they told me about the
circumstances that compelled them to leave Iraq or
risk being killed by gunmen from one militia or
another. Since then, my wife Nancy and I have
developed deep and we hope, lasting relationships
with families from the Middle East who have been
resettled in neighboring towns. Most of the families
are Muslim. Over the years, we have become part of
each other’s lives. There are no separation
barriers, no walls between us. And there is always
plenty of room in our homes and our hearts.
When one
family’s 12-year-old son was recently diagnosed with
acute lymphoblastic leukemia (on the same day that a
photo of his school’s winning soccer team appeared
in the local paper), my wife and I were there to
offer our support and to serve as advocates for the
family, especially when it came to navigating the
healthcare system and surmounting language barriers.
We have become so close that last spring, before
this latest crisis erupted, the boy’s mother invited
my wife to return with her to the city of her birth
to visit her ailing mother. For three weeks, Nancy
was treated to traditional Middle Eastern
hospitality in Muslim homes. Despite language
differences, she and all the families she met were
able to access a fundamental, universal language —
the language of understanding, compassion and love.
This, I believe, is the language we must all learn
to speak if this world of ours is to have any hope
of surviving and reaching its greatest, most humane
potential.
George
Capaccio is a writer and activist living in
Arlington, MA. During the years of US- and
UK-enforced sanctions against Iraq, he traveled
there numerous times, bringing in banned items,
befriending families in Baghdad, and deepening his
understanding of how the sanctions were impacting
civilians. His email is
Georgecapaccio@verizon.net. He welcomes comments
and invites readers to visit his website:
www.georgecapaccio.com |