“AM I MY BROTHER’S KEEPER ?”

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Doctors without Borders, Gandhi, Human Rights, Immigrants, India, Martin Luther King, Movie "Indian Summers", Trump

Here in France many people, especially the 10% out of work, are, as usual, hoping  they can make it financially till the end of the month.  Among the 50% of us who pay taxes, not a few are wondering how they are going to pay their next tax bills.  A fortunate minority, including me, and not only the filthy rich, are financially comfortable enough not to have such worries.  They are more concerned about keeping their jobs (or their pensions), avoiding burn-out (or dementia), and being at a safe distance when the next terrorist commits the next mass-murder.

Some are concerned about all those immigrants flooding into France and other wealthy countries in Europe.  They are not worried FOR the immigrants but BY them, about the burden if not the threat they represent (some of them at least, Trump would claim, must be terrorists !).  “Re-establish borders, refuse entry the way Hungary does, send them back to the war-zone.  Charity begins at home.  We’ve got enough problems as it is.  As a respected French Prime Minister once said : ‘France cannot take in the misery of the whole world.’  Hey, I’d like another beer.”

I recently saw a movie entitled “Indian Summers”.  The title referred not to unusually warm days in Autumn but to the laid-back life of Brits who had decided to confiscate the sub-continent.  It portrayed how the British in the 19th and 20th centuries lived in luxury in this pearl of the Empire, while the vast majority of its Indian population lived in squalor, unless they were employed as servants (“boys”) of the foreign ruling class.

The Haves and the Have-Nots.  It was ever thus.  The former often owe their good fortune to their exploitation of the less fortunate, and, naturally, are dedicated to the status quo.  (Some even claim their “divine right” to their privileges.)  But there have always been others who fight for equality : equality of opportunity and of human rights, beginning with the right to have enough to eat, a place to live, a job to provide for one’s family, an education for their children as well as their and their own health care.  In India Gandhi gave his life to the cause of justice and the emancipation of his people.

Every day we see unbearable evidence that the world, including India, is still far from Gandhi’s dream, as the U.S. is still far from Martin Luther King’s.  Many of us feel we should do something to help eradicate poverty, to feed the hungry, to stop the wars and to care for their refugees.  The Pope, and many Catholic parishes, have offered accommodation and assistance to a tiny, token fraction of the immigrants fleeing war-zones and poverty.  We feel guilty and ashamed of our own indifference – or refusal – to give of ourselves and of our substance to our fellow human beings, whether abroad, at our borders or begging in our own mean streets.  We may admire “Doctors without Borders” and the activists of other NGOs, but content ourselves, at best, with an occasional, tax-deductible, miniscule check.

Atheists or non-atheists, we all face a problem of conscience – if we have not already anaesthetized it.  Whatever the source of our motivation, our very humanity obliges us to allow poverty and injustice to challenge our innate selfishness.  The degree of our unselfishness will depend on whether or not we believe in liberty, equality and fraternity – universal values which we either allow to remain just a slogan or ideals which give meaning to our human condition.  God does not help those who help themselves.  But God help us if we do not help others.  A selfish world is not only short-sighted but ultimately suicidal.

Am I my brother’s keeper ?  My three brothers are all dead, as is one of my three sisters.  But Christ told us that our neighbors are our brothers and sisters.  I live in a semi-detached house.  My immediate neighbor, on the other side of the wall we share, lives alone like me.  She is five years older than me, which makes her 85.  She has already had a couple of falls, so her daughter has given me the keys to intervene should her mother need help.  It’s not much, but it’s the least I can do – until I myself need a neighbor to be his brother’s keeper, or at least watch-dog.  No man or woman should be, unless they prefer it that way, an island.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

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INSIDE THE MIND OF A HUMAN BOMB

Tags

Doctors without Borders, Kamikaze pilots, Pearl Harbor, Radical Islam, Suicide-bombers

It is, of course, impossible for a layman to understand the workings of a suicidal mind. Even psychiatrists, whose profession apparently leads many of its practitioners to take the irreversible step themselves, can never be sure about a given suicide’s motivation. The subject deserves reflection, however, since we have all become targets or potential collateral damage of terrorist self-immolation.

Some people are prepared to make significant personal sacrifices, for a variety of reasons. One cannot but admire Doctors Without Borders and other humanitarian paragons of generosity in sacrificing their personal comfort and gain for the sake of others. (Less admirable but often equally admired is the masochistic sacrifice some people make in renouncing certain of their essential human rights, by taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.) Then there are the heroes in both war and peace who are prepared to suffer and even die so that others may live. “Greater love than this …”. Christianity is built on the seminal belief in Christ’s self-sacrifice, voluntarily paying off an imagined ransom to an imagined God of Reckoning.

But suicide-bombers have marked the last twelve decades, since the “human bombs” of the Russian-Japanese war of 1904-1905, to the kamikaze pilots in the Pacific in the forties, to the human IEDs of Radical Islam today all over the planet. The 3800 young “tokkatai” (“special attack units”) of the Imperial Airforce, as well as the “human torpedoes” of the Imperial Navy, have been forgotten by people younger than I. Their motivation was more or less pure patriotism, though many realized the pointlessness of their desperate sacrifice in a war they knew Japan could never win.

Today’s terrorist suicide-bombers, and assassins like those who knew they could not survive their Charlie Hebdo mass-murders, have very different motivations. But the threat they represent is even more frightening than that of the Japanese kamikazes. These young men were the cream of the nation, students of engineering, literature, philosophy, law, the intelligentsia of an Empire brainwashed to worship its Emperor. They were the “broken jewels”, lauded by imperial military propaganda, in the words of a classic 6th century text : “Better to depart as a broken jewel rather than live intact as a common piece of pottery”. Radical Islam’s willing suicides are ordinary, unremarkable individuals, including even children, whose name is Legion. There are countless candidates ready to replace them, eager to destroy the enemies of Allah and enjoy the rewards He has promised them. There is no limit to the volunteers available. They are just pieces of pottery, ready to be shattered, their worth estimated only in terms of the number of their potential victims. The epithet is only metaphorical, but this exploitation of what we used to call cannon-fodder is even more diabolical than the bombing of Pearl Harbor. How can anyone justify today’s present horror in the name of religion ?

DELENDA RELIGIO