Distant Events - Aug 27 2022

 

Distant Events

Aug 27 2022

I am reading about distant events;

a planet circling a star

thousands of light years away,

and a cruel civil war

across a vast forbidding ocean

and who knows how many borders,

in a country

I couldn't find on a map.

If distance matters

and even one light year is unimaginable,

then why do I feel as detached

from my fellow travellers

down here on earth,

as from a distant planet

that can't even be seen

but only inferred?

They say we respond more intensely

to people like ourselves.

And I am White and middle class

and comfortably Canadian,

not hungry or Black

or any kind of African;

not a young impressionable man

enthralled by guns

attached to a cause.

And anyway, how could someone like me

possibly identify

with such inhuman savagery;

a civilized man,

and old enough

to know better.

Or am I focusing on difference

instead of failing to grasp

our commonality?

Does this darkness lurk in all of us,

baked in

to our DNA?

Am I a higher moral being,

or have I simply been favoured

by circumstance?

Meanwhile, the gas giant

circles its dwarf star

as it has for billions of years,

and we peer through time and distance

searching for life.

Because if earth

is the only place in the universe

life exists,

we must learn to live better

transcend ourselves.

Or so I say

trying to remain hopeful,

but day by day

feeling less and less;

helpless

to change anything

and far too far away.

I'm thinking in particular about the civil war in the Tigray province of Ethiopia. The contrast between the war in Ukraine is instructive. Aside from the different stakes -- a war of naked aggression that contains an existential risk to all democracies -- the fact that it is occurring in Europe and that in terms of lifestyle and ethnicity Ukrainians resemble us, may have a lot to do with our more robust response and engagement. We tend to condemn ourselves for this. Even raise the spectre of racism. But I can't think of anything more natural than to empathize more easily with people like ourselves. It's human nature. It's universal. It's understandable.

From a broader perspective, I think the 2nd World War may offer a more useful lens. Because of it's easy paradigm of good and evil -- one of the only truly "good" and righteous wars -- we also find it easy to demonize and dehumanize the Nazis: they were not at all like us; we would never have been complicit in such evil. But the instructive thing is not this distancing, it's to recognize our commonality: that immersed in the same social milieu, with the same propaganda, social pressures, validation, and impulse to conform, we would likely have behaved just as the average German did, jumping on the bandwagon of patriotism, loyalty, belonging, and self-righteous grievance. Transport us back to Germany in the late 30s, we would likely all have been Nazis. Or if not party members, at least would have been complicit: going along to get along. If there are important lessons to learn from that war, this is one.