{"id":5010,"date":"2019-05-18T12:40:22","date_gmt":"2019-05-18T19:40:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christianethicstoday.com\/wp\/?p=5010"},"modified":"2022-02-12T14:30:32","modified_gmt":"2022-02-12T21:30:32","slug":"why-i-care-a-brief-explanation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christianethicstoday.com\/wp\/why-i-care-a-brief-explanation\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Care…a Brief Explanation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why I Care…a Brief Explanation<\/strong>
\nBy John Ragland<\/em><\/p>\n

“Silence in the face of injustice is complicity with the oppressor.” – Ginetta Sagan[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

   I<\/em><\/strong> grew up a privileged American. During the 50s, 60s and early 70s, Beirut was a haven for expats. There were tens of thousands of Americans – businessmen, diplomats, missionaries, spies and their families (which explains how this “missionary kid” came to be). Beirut defied many of the stereotypes Americans, even now, still cling to about the “exotic” Middle East.   <\/p>\n

    There were mosques and churches everywhere, sometimes right across the street from each other. There were all sorts of different religions and ethnicities and languages and customs, all jumbled and tumbled into a unique mélange that even now defines the restless quirkiness that is Beirut. Not far from my high school, near the American embassy, there was a thousand-year-old Jewish neighborhood with an ancient synagogue and storefront signs in both Hebrew and Arabic. There was even a street named after President Kennedy.<\/p>\n

   But, like too many Americans I have known, I didn't really pay enough attention to this exciting, exhilarating world I was growing up in. Chalk some of it up to youthful introversion, but there was an unhealthy heap of American arrogance all mixed in, too. I hate to admit it, but yes, I was an “Ugly American” – one of those Americans who spent decades abroad but never abandoned their hubris, their provincial, exceptionalist sense that they were somehow innately better than everyone else.<\/p>\n

   Missionary kids weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either. Most expats in those days had maids and drivers and some even had their own cooks and gardeners. We were often chauffeured past sprawling Palestinian refugee camps (even now, after 70 years, they're scattered all over Lebanon and Syria and Jordan and even the still-occupied areas of Palestine). But I never really saw or understood or cared. I was an American. My parents were American. I was surrounded by Americans and educated by Americans, at a school that was populated primarily by and for Americans. Even as we drove by those squalid camps, the misery and humiliation of too many desperately poor families, living in tiny shacks made from cardboard and flattened tin cans – well, it was just scenery to me, part of an abstract background rushing by.<\/p>\n

   I never saw, never heard, never bothered to understand the real, suffering people in those camps, or the gross injustice that had forced them to become my reluctant, unwelcome neighbors. That these were fellow humans who were, even then, enduring their second and third generations of exile was unimportant to me and to most Americans like me.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

   We used to go swimming at a fancy athletic center called Cité Sportive. Its pool was an Olympic-sized beauty surrounded by manicured lawns and a high wall. A Palestinian refugee camp (can you still call it a “camp” decades later?) had sprung up next door, but the pool was completely off-limits to those nearby “campers” – a gatekeeper made sure no one got in but Westerners and well-heeled (rich) Lebanese.<\/p>\n

   On the inside, up against the wall in one corner, there was a small hamburger stand. Next to it were window-like openings in the wall that looked out toward the refugee camp. I can still remember now how we stood there casually munching our burgers and “freedom” fries while we gazed scornfully (and oh-so blindly) at the Palestinian children playing outside, blissfully naked and gleeful in the green, scummy runoff from “our” crystal-clear pool.<\/p>\n

   More than 40 years later, that memory still haunts me. A stone’s throw from that very spot where we munched and mocked is the unmarked mass grave for hundreds, maybe thousands of innocent victims of the infamous 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre[3]<\/a>, one of the most horrific, shameful, iconic events in a generally horrible, shameful, brutal civil war that lasted 15 years. American diplomats had explicitly guaranteed the safety of hundreds of children, women and men; but recently declassified documents reveal that US diplomats were told by the Israelis what they and their allies might be up to.<\/p>\n

   Less than 10 years after my last happy splash in that exclusive pool, some of those children I laughed at – maybe all of them – were probably buried there in that mass grave, their stinking, hacked, bloated and blackened bodies bulldozed into a hastily-dug pit.<\/p>\n

   My blindness and indifference then is a big part of what drives me now to try to understand and care more, especially about that part of the world I failed to see while I was still in it. But what may have started out as an exercise in exorcising the demons of remorse, for the callous indifferences of my youth, has become an obsession – an ongoing passion for opposing injustice and intolerance everywhere, against Palestinians specifically, and Arabs and Muslims generally.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

   Here in America, and throughout what we call the Judeo-Christian, lily-white “West”, a barely latent racism and xenophobia have resurfaced, this time fueled and focused by 9-11 anger, Fox News and a fundamentalist frenzy that demands complete allegiance to Israel, no matter what, and a wacky eschatology that waxes rapturous about Armageddon.<\/p>\n

   One of the side effects of really caring about something is that you then hunger for knowledge, for the truth that will set you free. And when you know more, you cannot be a silent bystander. The more I know, the more I am compelled to speak and write and rant to anyone who will listen. I have to. It's become a bit trite, a bit cliché, but silence really is complicity…<\/p>\n

Addendum<\/u><\/p>\n

   Random milestones along my political\/social “road to Damascus” conversion experience:<\/p>\n

• Wonderment as a child, during a Beirut Baptist School (BBS) playground game of world conquest (played with a pocketknife thrown into a circle drawn in the dirt), when one player chose to play for “his” Lebanon rather than a “winning is everything” superpower like America or the USSR.<\/p>\n

• Incredulity\/embarrassment at widespread, uncritical acceptance of really bad eschatology that favors Israel and castigates Arabs\/Muslims (see Hal Lindsey’s “Late Great Planet Earth”<\/em> and the more recent crop of gilded TV evangelists\/charlatans).<\/p>\n

• Shock\/disgust at the immediate reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing, when first suspicions were Arab terrorists must be responsible.<\/p>\n

• 9-11 and the rise of nationalism\/fascism in America, along with overt prejudice against Arabs\/Muslims\/immigrants. The abandonment of peace initiatives between Israel and Palestine and regional neighbors, a rush to crush\/occupy\/proselytize (in that order) Iraq on WMD pretense, 2006 rape of Lebanon, 2007 rape of Nahr al-Bared refugee camp[5]<\/a> (north of Tripoli), 2008\/2012\/2014 rape of Gaza, and unchecked expansion of Israeli settlements.<\/p>\n

• Dismay at Americans’ eagerness to torture (we want to believe in the efficacy of fictional Jack Bauer’s outrageous brutality), dismay at finding out we’ve been behaving this way against Muslims for more than a century (see Twain’s account of soldiers slaughtering in the Philippines).<\/p>\n

• Learning about 1950s CIA involvement in Iran (from retired agent Ray Close, no less),     etc.<\/p>\n

• Rise of the Tea Party movement, birthed to oppose\/impeach the black president in White House, accuse him of being African, Muslim, Communist, etc.<\/p>\n

• Local (state, community) efforts to embrace revised secular history and establish Christian (Judeo-Christian) fundamentalism as basis for governance (David Barton comes to Hot Springs to tutor new tea party government).<\/p>\n

• USA’s tepid\/hypocritical\/confused response to “Arab Spring” (Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria) and continued overt favoritism towards Israel.<\/p>\n

John Ragland: a short biography<\/strong><\/p>\n

   John Ragland is a working curmudgeon with a cat-killing curiosity in politics, religion, history and other manifestations of irrational human behavior. He resides in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a semi-autonomous region of the United States (a waning political experiment on the third planet of a minor solar system in a remote corner of the Milky Way galaxy) with his wife, a mutt named Bernie, and other assorted wildlife.<\/p>\n

   Ragland is a son and grandson of Baptist missionaries and educators. He was born in Beirut, Lebanon, where his father was a school headmaster for more than 30 years (and before that, a B-17 navigator during the last months of WW2). He grew up in the Middle East during the turbulent 50s, 60s, and 70s, but left just before Lebanon’s nightmare 15-year civil war began in earnest. Most reputable historians do not associate the onset of that tragic conflict with his departure.<\/p>\n

   After attending college in Oklahoma and working for a large energy company now forever identified with the dark lord Dick Cheney, he moved his family to Hot Springs in 1994 (hard to believe it’s been more than 20 years). While not laboring to keep his family fed and out of the rain, Ragland spends most of his time reading, following world affairs, blogging (at levantium.com<\/a>) under a barely-disguised snotty French pseudonym, and staring at the sun. He works tirelessly for the OAFS (Obsessive Alliteration-Fondness Syndrome) Foundation, as both its only benefactor and sole beneficiary.<\/p>\n

   Ragland’s political pilgrimage has meandered across much of the left-right continuum. Once a staunch conservative (by all the standard litmus tests), he found himself suddenly adrift when the rest of the country lurched hard-right after 9-11. He is a frequent critic of our national love affair with wars, rampant nationalism in general, and the resurgent, xenophobic frenzy that masquerades as patriotism.<\/p>\n

   He once defined his religious confession as Zen Baptist, a burgeoning movement (of one) that is seeking to reclaim the mantle of Christian orthodoxy from fevered fundamentalists just itching for Armageddon. He is now an Episcopalian.  Ragland may be reached by sending him questions telepathically, or by sending him money. He prefers the latter.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

[1]<\/a> "Silence in the face of injustice is complicity with the oppressor." Ginetta Sagan (1925 – 2000, the “Topolino” or “Little Mouse” who was imprisoned, raped and tortured by Italian fascists during World War II but survived to help build Amnesty International and battle the abuse of political prisoners around the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2]<\/a> "It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive."  C. W. Leadbeater (1847 – 1934), controversial occultist, clairvoyant, co-founder of the Liberal Catholic Church.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3]<\/a> See, in addition to many other articles “The United States Was Responsible for the 1982 Massacre of Palestinians in Beirut”, By Rashid Khalidi  The Nation<\/em> September 14, 2017.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4]<\/a> "You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you." Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Adviser, to Joe Scarborough on MSNBC's Morning Joe 12\/30\/2008.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[5]<\/a> See: Maria Holt, Women and Conflict in the Middle East: Palestinian Refugees and the Response to Violence<\/em> (2013) books.google.com\/books?isbn=1780761015<\/a>  See also, www.thedailybeast.com\/among-the-refugees<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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