“Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.”
– Jalal Ud-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207-1273 CE), Persia
It is hard to process events on the scale of the past week, or in general, the level of violence and cruelty to which we’ve become accustomed in this century. I am stunned at the poorly thought-out, ugly, and often outright hateful things many of my friends and family members are posting online, and I feel like I don’t recognize them at all. I understand the initial temptation to give in to fear and call for violence, but I truly don’t believe we will ever find peace by shutting out refugees, putting all Muslims in internment camps, or nuking great swaths of the Middle East (these are some of the milder, more average war crimes and acts of hatred I’ve seen suggested).
Within 24 hours of the Paris attacks, while France was still in the first day of mourning, I had read so many news articles, think pieces on terrorism, memes condemning all Muslims, counter-memes reminding people that ISIS/ISIL/Daesh has nothing to do with Islam, outrage that Beirut was getting short shrift in news coverage, and questions about whether or not states should welcome Syrian refugees, I was shocked and appalled. Was this what September 12th was like, and I just didn’t notice because we were still crying and trying to find people? Or is this what America has become, subverting thoughtful, reasoned responses for instantaneous, aggressive ones? Is this a product of social media, or a reflection of how little we’ve learned after more than a decade of essentially war mongering for profit?
I was relieved by the truly beautiful outpourings of support and love I saw, like Plácido Domingo leading the Metropolitan Opera cast and audience in singing “La Marseillaise” before their Saturday matinée, or this particularly touching way James Taylor closed Stephen Colbert, which had me burst into tears with the first few notes:
These glimmers of humanity were sadly few and far between, and what I thought were the initial outbursts of fear or misinformation have become a steady stream of propaganda and appalling short-sightedness. I watched the Democratic party debate that Saturday, worried that the candidates I’ve so far found to be sensible and intelligent would need to come out brandishing a flag and AK-47 to be electable in the general race. And somewhere around Mike Huckabee bashing Hillary Clinton on Twitter for refusing to call a terrorist organization Islamic, I recognized the exploitation of fear and ruthless bullying of Americans for what it is: campaign strategy, lobbying technique, grossly insincere manipulation, nothing more.
I believe some of the people fearful of welcoming Syrian refugees are honestly concerned for their families and their safety. But this fear doesn’t come from their hearts – it is instilled in them by politicians and public figures trying to turn them against all Muslim people or all immigrants. That concern itself isn’t founded in much beyond racism and corporate greed, but it’s an effective rally cry to encourage Americans to treat other people with a cold insensitivity I wouldn’t expect in our worst enemies.
If we want to address terrorism on a global scale, the answer isn’t more bombing and destabilization, since this generation of terrorists is something we brought about in the last round of annihilation. Cynical people scoffed when Bernie Sanders didn’t retreat from his statement that climate change contributes to terrorism, but it’s really quite accurate. The more people suffer and the more they must struggle for limited resources and survival, the more susceptible they become to being turned against one another, under the guise of ideological differences. It’s how the Nazis exploited an economically troubled German population toward an agenda of ethnic cleansing, but we refuse to recognize it now. This lesson echoes over centuries in history, but we keep repeating the pattern.
That is why it is so important when faced with challenges to our personal comfort and security, we dig deep for compassion instead of responding from a place of fear or self-interest. Reductivist thinking in the refugee crisis would stop at “terrorists might sneak in, so lock everyone out,” but we have counter-terrorism measures in place already for homegrown threats, and all the rights we signed away with the Patriot Act don’t apply to refugees in the first place (though they should). I believe there should be a path to employment and citizenship, so that Syrian refugees may have the same opportunity for a new life in a free land that all of our ancestors were afforded when their suffering became unbearable. The knee-jerk response that we don’t have the resources is exactly what we’ve been told in the past to encourage us to act selfishly and close-mindedly toward each other. And it’s just not true.
We have a garden of resources and compassion that, as much as we’ve abused it and sold it off to oil companies and media conglomerates, remains fertile and recoverable. We are at the precipice of change, where we can choose to become a country that helps all its citizens and welcomes others, or we can isolate ourselves and watch everyone’s quality of life deteriorate so Donald Trump and a handful of oligarchs can maximize their profits. We can look in our hearts and decide how much we actually need, how much of our time and energy is spent acquiring and maintaining property and material possessions when we would gain so much more by giving of ourselves to others. I doubt I will see the utopian existence we’re actually capable of achieving in my lifetime, but I desperately hope there can be some return to altruism and humanity, of helping someone who’s fallen because they are a fellow human and it’s just the right thing to do.
I don’t have a strategic solution prepared for how to address conflicts that have been churning for centuries, but I know in the depths of my heart, the root of peace is compassion. If we want to make the world safe for ourselves, we have to consider why it is unsafe or full of suffering for others. We can’t just shrug and say, “Glad I have air conditioning” when reading reports that in 15 years large portions of the Middle East will be uninhabitable by humans. We can’t bury our heads in the sand and say that because something is not in our backyard, it’s not our problem.
I am often dismissed for being overly idealistic or naive, but I would always rather believe – and expect – people are capable of good and hold them accountable than just accept that we’re inherently selfish and evil. We are our ugliest when we let the seeds of cynicism and fear grow into complacency and hatred. Until we start regarding all of humanity as a whole and resisting the divisive mentalities of racism, classism, or iconoclasm, we will all be limited and suffer for our lack of compassion. The world’s problems are our problems, and the answer will always, always be love and kindness toward one another.