That I Can Do

The grim milestone of 4000 Americans killed in Iraq has brought our debacle there back in the news, where it never should have left. Jane Smiley, always excellent, has written the definitive article about it in the Huffington Post (thanks Sheria).

We should never have gone in: we did.  The best outcome if we stay is that we keep a lid on the boiling unrest, a hellish status quo by anyone's definition and debatable in any case now that the Awakening looks very much like the Unraveling and Al-Sadr is untrucing.  If we get out there will almost certainly be a great, violent upheaval. But it will be an Iraqi upheaval, and the solution that will eventually emerge will be an Iraqi solution.  By definition, it is the only one that will stick.

What we can and should do as part of the withdrawal process is to guarantee that every Iraqi that translated, guided and worked for us, that will be the very first target of the death squads when we withdraw, get asylum in the United States. We should also pour aid into Jordan and Syria so that all the refugees there who don't feel they can return have some means of getting on their feet.  Relative to the cost of the war, this aid is nothing.

Anti-immigrant/Muslim hysteria will follow any such proposal: shame on them I say. We go into a country insisting we will be "greeted as liberators" and then are willing to walk away from the very people who did just that. If we really want to change Iraq, in the long run, we could find no better way than to save the very people most likely to bring democracy back there eventually.

It is impossible not to contemplate all of these issues without risking complete and total despair over all of the suffering, past, present and future; in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the refugee camps, in the cities and small towns across America where widows and mothers and orphans of soldiers grieve. I know once I get to that place, I risk doing what so many of us do--turning the channel. Yesterday there was an interview on NPR about a new book about slavery "A Crime So Monstrous," and I was eminently relieved that I arrived at my destination just in time to miss all but 5 minutes of it. It only took the story of one person to horrify me.  And of course, there's the guilt. If I was a good person, I would be trying to end war and slavery in the world. But I am bascially bad, selfish and lazy. Rather than have these thoughts, I want to avoid the news causing them. I want to watch Dancing With the Stars and wonder if I can afford an oil change, as if that's plenty enough to worry about. 

This is where a passage from C.S. Lewis quoted in my friend Heather's book, Redeemed, was so helpful to me.  He wrote, in The Problem of Pain: "There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there can ever be in the universe. The addition of a milllion fellow sufferers ands no more pain." 

What he means is that since all anybody can suffer is what he or she can suffer, to understand the suffering of all the world we need only understand the suffering of one person. And that I can do, because, like all of us, I have gone through times of extraordinary grief and  pain--this is part of the human condition. I cannot imagine the suffering of millions, but of one, that I can do. I may have to multiply my own by many factors, but it is not beyond grasping.

This helped me immensely. It also provides a excellent perspective from which to proceed. I don't have to make curing the world's ills--which is grandiose to the point of arrogance in any case--my goal. But I can always be kind to someone else today--and work up and out from there..

MCO 2008

P.S. That's Munch and Sargent in the Hy-Art.