Yesterday was a rough day for the world. I’m pretty sure that by now you have heard about the Malaysian Airlines flight that was reportedly shot down in eastern Ukraine, and if you happened to catch any news that wasn’t about that specific situation, you probably heard about Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza. People won’t necessarily remember the specifics of these events in a few years, but they will be in our minds for a while. Immediate effects of these events are already apparent, as flights are being rerouted to avoid the area and the people of Gaza (and Israel) are living in fear of the unknown.
Sometimes the events we hear about on the news grab our attention immediately and we know that the world will never be the same. I think of 9/11 as an example of this in my own lifetime. Other events however, seem to be incredibly important and are covered in the news for months and months but end up not meaning much to the world as a whole. Y2K anyone?
Since the world is constantly in motion it can be hard to decide which news events are the ones that are going to matter down the road. I find myself beginning to ignore certain stories, having made up my mind that surely this particular story doesn’t matter. Do you realize it has been over a month since ISIS (or ISIL) has overrun significant portions of northern Iraq? Are you aware that Syria has been embroiled in civil war for 3 years now? Did you know that Egypt has experienced 2 coups in the last 2 years? Turkey is seemingly simmering and erupted in massive protests last year, and Greece is still suffering chronic economic trouble? I’ll mention Afghanistan and Yemen in passing as former/current hotbeds of terrorist activity, and wrap up with continued battles in Libya for control of the state.
A quickly highlighted map of regional tension and conflict. It SHOULD NOT be considered accurate for use in actually describing the conflicts or the placement of people. I literally made this in 5 minutes as a quick visual aid.
Why mention all of this you ask? Well…I think that the whole region is on edge and heading towards an even larger change than we have already seen. 100 years ago the world was seemingly plunged headfirst into the first World War by the simple assassination of one man. As with many of the stories in our history books, my previous statement is a drastic oversimplification, but the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand seems to have been the trigger that set everything off. Will the murder of 300 people on a civilian airplane have the same result 100 years later? Or perhaps a strong leader who stands ineffectively opposed will rise from a country burdened with economic struggles and slowly begin taking small pieces of territory to see what he can get away with. Hindsight is easy, foresight is never clear, and those who claim to have the gift are considered foolish until proven right.
As I drove to work yesterday listening to the news, I could look out my window and see only peace around me. As I tried to imagine the people in Gaza who were using the short 5 hour window they had been given to go to the bank and buy enough food and water to last through the unknown end of the conflict around them, I couldn’t. I couldn’t put myself in their situation because I have never known anything like it. I could rant and rave against the people causing it, I could spend hours on the internet watching videos about the conflict, and who started it, and why it continues, but I could not imagine what it would be like to be there. I could not see the faces of the people, or imagine the sounds and smells that would be around me. The same is true for the people being starved out by their own government in Aleppo, and the people who died yesterday in that plane crash.
We forget that the stories on the news are about people. Instead we focus on groups and nations, attributing the actions of the relatively few to the various groups as a whole. The “pro-Russian separatists” didn’t shoot that plane down. One small group of people who were associated with the separatists did, and while they certainly meant to shoot A plane down, they almost certainly didn’t intend to shoot THAT plane down. One (relatively) small group of people continues to fire rockets from Gaza into Israel, and the unfortunate consequence is the punishment of the much larger group of people.
Identifying as nations and groups is benign in many circumstances, it gives you a sense of belonging and identity, and gives you opportunities to feel pride or joy when your group does something worthy of note. However, we must not forget that before we belonged to any nation or group, we were first people. Before we knew of such things as Ohio or Republicans, we were people. Before we decided that each person had to fit into a certain specific segment of society, we were people, humans, homo viator. We must not forget that we were created as homo imago dei, as men (and women) created in the image of God. Each of us. All of us. Our segmentation into a specific group of people, nation, or religious sect does not change who we were first, and the specific segmentation we are oftentimes arbitrarily assigned should not change our value as a person to the other people around us. We should not stop caring about something once it crosses some imaginary line drawn on a sheet of paper, because those made in the image of God are perishing around us.
So yesterday was a rough day for the world, and a tragedy for its people.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
John Donne