NOT JUST US AND THEM

Posted on 11/16/2015 | About France

“When my people died, no country bothered to light up its landmarks in the colors of their flag,” Elie Fares, a Lebanese doctor, wrote on his blog. “When my people died, they did not send the world into mourning. Their death was but an irrelevant fleck along the international news cycle, something that happens in THOSE parts of the world.”

And of course, this is true. In the west we mourn and grieve mightily for the dead citizens of countries with which we are familiar, with whom we relate, and whom we believe, sometimes misguidedly, to be like minded. When death, disease, war and genocide kill hundreds and thousands of citizens in those countries with which we are less acquainted – less comfortable – such as Rwanda, Darfur, Beirut or Bosnia, even India and China - we simply cannot seem to conjure up the same empathy, or compassion, or fellow feeling … why? Yet, we watch and cheer at films like American Sniper, and the Hurt Locker that glorify violence and death and call it entertainment. Americans (and many others) cheered Donald Trump when he suggested that if the citizens of Paris were armed the outcome of the attacks would be quite different. He is right. The outcome would have been different. The carnage would have been infinitely greater. Imagine how many more innocent people would have been killed in a panicked shootout with guns blazing from every quarter.

Why is it as North Americans we do not educate ourselves as to what really is happening in the world? Republican presidential candidate, Jeb Bush, whom one might expect to know better, declared that “if you’re a Christian, increasingly in Lebanon, or Iraq or Syria, you’re gonna be beheaded.” That will be news to Lebanon’s Christians, who hold significant political power. When the bar is this low – the prospects for our future are dim.

In Canada with a new administration that promises a different approach, we can only wait and watch. Whether “Sunny Ways” becomes our deliverance, or our downfall, remains to be seen. We do not make light of the deaths in Paris – they are tragic, pointless and unprovoked. But hundreds of innocent civilians also die each week in Syria and Iraq and we regard them dispassionately - a line of copy or a sentence from a newsreader.

What is needed now is a measured response. Carefully thought out, planned and appropriate. An impulsive retaliation with all guns blazing is not the answer. It never is. But undoubtedly that is what it will be. Even the retaliatory injunction, ‘an eye for an eye’ has long been surpassed. Regrettably, we now look at an eye and six corpses for an eye. Wars will never end this way. All lives matter. Regardless of race, religion or colour.

The families of those killed in Paris will grieve no less that the families of those killed in Middle East. Perhaps it is incumbent to those of us who stand (luckily) on the sidelines, to grieve for them all and for a world in which such violence can exist.