Us and Them
I’m in the middle of a book on the history of Cuba.
It may sound boring, but it’s not. Cuba’s history is a mismatch of heroism, extreme racism, lofty aspirations for equality and the mostly ineffective pursuit of prosperity.
Every country, perhaps, is a story of us and them, but Cuba’s history is a microcosm of this idea playing out through several centuries. It included Spanish, British and Americans vs imported African slaves; the slaves vs their “owners;” the sugar magnets vs the government; the government vs various rebel groups; the Spanish vs the Americans; the revolutionaries versus the Cuban elite and Americans.
Cuban history is a textbook case of how one group classifies as enemy all the members of another group, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
Not Just Cuba
But, of course, this is not just true about Cuba. It’s an example of human history as a whole and is evident in current world events.
We kill Iranians; they kill us. Russians kill Ukrainians; Ukrainians kill Russians. Israelis kill Palestinians; Palestinians kill Israelis. And it’s not just governments against governments. If you’re a member of any group – and, of course, we all are – you’re a potential target.
We Americans only need to remember 9/11, the series of coordinated terrorist attacks on the U.S. by al Qaeda on Sept. 11, 2001, that killed nearly 3,000 people and brought down the famous World Trade Center buildings in New York City.
Anyone Can Be a Target
The janitors who daily mopped the floors and cleaned the rest rooms in those buildings, the secretaries who did the bidding of executives in the offices there, and even most of the executives, lawyers, and financial workers in those buildings had no part and made no decisions that influenced American actions against al Qaeda. Yet they became targets.
The vast majority of merchants, students and workers in Tehran have had no part in their government’s decisions that have angered U.S. and Israeli leaders. They didn’t get to vote their leaders into power. Yet they are paying the price for being born at a time when their city is being bombed. They are “collateral damage,” many American leaders would say.
It’s part of humanity’s proclivity for seeing the world in “us-and-them” terms. We don’t seem to be able to see humanity as family, as all fellow humans as brothers and sisters. Even we Christians ignore Jesus’ and our churches’ teachings about war. We may go to Mass or religious services regularly, but we view many of those teachings as “unrealistic.”
I can’t help but think of Jesus’ quote from the prophet Isiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”
“Holy” War?
Many American religious leaders even see the Iranian war as some kind of biblical mandate, a “holy” war, according to news stories. Many others, however – and we can take a degree of comfort from this – have been outspoken against the current war, and war in general.
“Stability and peace are not built with mutual threats, nor with weapons, which sow destruction, pain, and death,” said Pope Leo IX recently about the war in Iran, “but only through a reasonable, authentic, and responsible dialogue.”
Said Rev. Yehiel Curry, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, on the failure of Congress to reign in the Trump administration’s current war: “The costs in lives and safety of this failure will be borne by those least able to avoid it — children, families and those without the means to flee. Its deadly toll has been, and will continue to be, paid with the lives of our neighbors, including our siblings in Christ in the Middle East.”
