This week in my theology class, our professor came in, obviously distraught. He took a deep breath and looked up at us.
“Does it feel like your lives have changed?” He asked.
We all looked at each other, thinking certainly he’d lost his mind. Did we all fail a quiz? What’s going on?
“The events of Friday, Paris -- did you guys feel your lives change?”
We all suddenly understood.
Our professor is an old white man with a beard and a little hint of a Chicago accent. He typically spends the 85 minutes of class lecturing us about the Bible, is very stern with not using electronics and has taught this same class more than 50 times in his career at the university. His lectures can be boring at times, but sometimes he can make us laugh or helps us understand something. He’s probably a little too honest with us, lets us grade our own quizzes and still firmly believes in students coming to his office hours and wanting to be in class. So far I’ve learned that class moves faster when you pay attention and take diligent notes, and taking notes is the key to not having to study for his quizzes but not much else. He can quote from the Bible, tell you book and verse numbers by heart, but I’ll be honest, he has a hard time connecting with 20-year-olds.
But today he said something that was so real to me, I had to take a step back.
He asked us to start a rather open-ended discussion about the events of the weekend. It began with someone saying, “Yeah well Paris was bad, but there was also an attack in Beirut, and an earthquake in Mexico, and an attack in Lebanon.” Typical responses of our generation. Things we’d seen written all over Facebook and twitter all weekend. Our professor looked confused and a little upset. He expected sadness probably, and some internal reflection. This went on for a while before he said, “Maybe I’m just not getting the point. Maybe I’m from a different time. A time when America was safe and these things happening to nations like ours could not even be fathomed.” And the he apologized. He said he wanted to say sorry to us because we grew up in the era where 9/11 was a harsh reality, not a horror movie. He realized that we were from a different America.
And he’s right. We grew up in the America that had been tainted. We were 6 years old when the veil of American security was shattered by the decisions of a few hundred men in the Middle East who decided they did not believe in our way of life. We were much like those who are young in Paris right now. We grew up in an era where it was okay to question this country we lived in, where people all over the place were obsessed with ripping back this mask that America was a dreamland, the birthplace of wealth, beauty and industry. We’re from the generation that believes it is allowed to take all of the messed up things that America does and use them as weapons against the country we were raised in. We keep crying out that America is not the perfect place that everyone thinks it is. We believe that we each have this right to free speech, and that means we need to scream out insurrection at everything that America has done wrong. With the events of the weekend, we can then lump Paris in with ourselves. France has done some terrible things to innocent people just as we have.
But is that all we’ve done? Is that what you want to scream about right now? With the world on the brink of a war?
The Western world, the developed world, breeds the wealthiest people on the planet and we desperately need them, and the safety that has come to be the norm here. These are the people that take the steps, that make the change. That aren’t constrained by all this bureaucratic red tape. I’m specifically not listing examples because for every one person I list, someone will come up with a wealthy person who has done wrong -- who has been arrested, committed fraud, or done any number of terrible things.
But I tell you now that the world is full of terrible things. If I come off as angry, it’s because I am! We can’t stop everything! People who respond to the Paris attacks by saying, “Well there was a bombing in Beirut why don’t you care about that?” are missing the point. The world is a messed up place. It's up to us to do something about it. Every country is not the Middle East. There is a distinction between the Western and Eastern worlds and it matter. It matters that there is some place in the world for refugees to go.
The only reason you are even sitting in this classroom and allowed to have an opinion, to speak up about your special little snowflake of an idea on this campus that costs you $50,000 a year to set foot on, is because you live in this country. If we broke out into a civil war or were violently attacked by extremists that we could do nothing about, you better believe that we’d be begging for a safe place to retreat to. Every single man, woman and child in America could not defend themselves individually, and every man, woman and child in the Middle East cannot defend themselves individually. That is why we are here. That is why we have been blessed, been privileged to live this life of safety in a country that is continuously attacked by the free speech of its residents. That is why every governor feels that they need to bar their states from accepting refugees, in fear that their people will speak out, yell that we’re trying to have our country turned into a refugee camp for those people seeking the safety of what we long ago thought was the greatest thing a country could offer -- freedom.
We live in the wealthiest country on the damn planet, and when another country that actually has the capacity to do something to stop the injustices that are literally burning our world till it dies gets attacked, our response is to fight about what color profile pictures we should have. Are you kidding me?! That's not what this war is about. This war is about the dignities of people! The innocent lives that are being lost everywhere!
By refusing to #standwithparis because no one will acknowledge the other atrocities in the world, you’re valuing the lives of those in the Middle East over those in Paris, and no lives are more valuable than others. We are all people. Let us be people together.
When people ask me what I think about what happened in Paris, I think of the people who died, the reasons they died and the millions of other people who have died at the hands of these terrorists, and all I can think of in my head is the entire world, with tear stained faces screaming at the sky to just stop. What more will it take?! How many more innocent lives have to be destroyed, stripped of their dignity and meaning before we realize what we’re doing to ourselves?
Our theology discussion ended with a girl paraphrasing a beautiful Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “We've learned to fly the air like birds, we've learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we haven't learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters.”
I ask you now: When will we learn?
