Pretending We`re Iraqis
By Al Staggs, Chaplain and Performing Artist, Santa Fe, NM
When I was a child growing up in Arkansas, I enjoyed playing games of "pretend." I`d pretend I was Hopalong Cassidy or John Wayne fighting marauding outlaws. I`d often trade in my cowboy hat for a football helmet to make the winning touchdown in what, in my mind, was the game of the century.
Many of us still occasionally daydream that we`re someone else, someone we admire who has accomplished something we`ve always wanted to do. If you are an occasional daydreamer or pretender, I challenge you to pretend, to put yourself in the place of an Iraqi mother or father.
Jassim and his wife Amira, along with their daughter, Farah, and two boys, Mohammed and Ali, have lived in the capital city of Baghdad all of their lives. Amira, Farah and Ali were all killed in initial raids on their city in March of 2003. Mohammed lost a leg in that bombing. The family`s home was razed by the bombings.
Those of us who live in the United States will find it virtually impossible to comprehend the kind of grief and anger that Jassim feels daily because of what was done to his family. As impossible as it must seem to enter the world of Jassim, let us attempt to immerse ourselves in the life of this Iraqi who has lost virtually everything. Can we imagine the level of grief Jassim must feel daily? The only means of escape from this ongoing agony is to fall into an occasional deep sleep, but the inevitable waking up from that sleep is a severe punishment.
And what of his anger? Is it possible to understand that as a husband and parent who has lost his spouse, two of his children, and his home, how he might feel toward the occupying American forces? Is it possible to understand that this man might want, more than anything, to exact a costly revenge on the American forces? Jassim was not in any way shielded from the horror of seeing his loved ones mangled. There was no funeral home to quickly pick up his family members` bodies and whisk them off to an expert mortician who might be able to disguise some of the ghastly effects that the bombings had on the bodies of his wife and two dead children. How do you put yourself in the place of a person such as Jassim, a person who asks himself what he has done to deserve such an awful fate?
It is an extremely difficult exercise to attempt to understand the viewpoint of someone who is so completely different from ourselves in nationality, religion, and social status. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was able to make this transition, learning to look at life from the perspective of what he called "the view from below." His ability to see life from the other side would ultimately lead to his becoming involved in the conspiracy against Adolf Hitler. In his view, what was happening to Jews and other victims of the concentration camps was unconscionable.
Bertolt Brecht has a magnificent statement from his Beggars Opera that explains our limited understanding of how the other half lives until we are there, when he writes "even saintly folk will act like sinners, when they haven`t had their customary dinners."
In the movie, A Time to Kill, Carl Lee Hailey (a black man) is brought to trial for the deaths of three men who brutally raped his young daughter. In the closing argument of the trial, Carl`s attorney, Jake Tyler Brigance, asked the jury to imagine the circumstances surrounding the brutal rape of a young woman. At the end of his detailed description of the raping of a young girl, the attorney says, "now imagine that she is white."
This exercise of viewing life from the vantage point of the other is akin to the old Native American axiom that to truly understand others "we must walk a mile in their moccasins." To not attempt to see life from the perspective of Iraqis is to stand in danger of viewing all of life from the vantage point of "entitlement." The spirit of entitlement means that I deserve my place in life just for being an American, or a male, or a Christian, and that I consider the fate of those less fortunate is their deserved lot in life.
If we cannot view life from the perspective of the Iraqis, we should at least attempt to imagine how God views the plight of the Iraqis and our relationship to their heightened suffering. Does God view the Iraqi and Muslim as being any less deserving of Grace than each of us who live as Christians in the United States?
Clarence Jordan once said that when he was a small child he wondered if God had favorite children. He had sung many times the words of the children`s song, "Jesus Loves the Little Children." The song states that Jesus loves all the children of the world, whatever color they are. To young Clarence, it appeared that God loved the little white children more than God loved the black children, because the white children were better fed, better clothed, and had much better homes than the black children. Clarence realized later in life that this disparity was not because God didn`t love the black children as much as the white children; this gulf existed because the white people didn`t love black children in the same way that God loved them.
In order to understand the feelings of people such as Jassim, we must confess that many of us in the United States make many assumptions about our place as God`s chosen and special people. We assume that we can do pretty much anything that we want to do in order to ward off potential dangers no matter what kind of damage we do to other people God created.
Another assumption that many of us make is that because we are American Christians, we are particularly favored by God and what we do is far less onerous or potentially harmful than the acts of terrorists or Muslims. We can wrongfully assume that God does not hold us accountable for violent acts that our nation commits against innocent people, such as Iraqi civilians.
This world is too small and too interconnected to pretend that we are uniquely different from or better than the citizens of Iraq. They, like us, are equal citizens of this earth. They, like us, are children of God. We most certainly have no special right or calling to inflict death and destruction on their society and their citizens. May God help all of us to see this.
