Oh dear

The Winston-Salem Journal, our local newspaper, runs a poll question each week. This week’s question was: Is anyone dear to you serving in Iraq or Afghanistan?

My immediate assumption was that the poll’s authors were trying to get at whether people responding to the poll have relatives or friends serving in these war-torn areas. Perhaps there will be some sort of follow-up question to see how those with close ties to people serving in the military differ in regard to views on the war when compared to those who are not connected to any service members.

However, my next thought was that perhaps the poll’s authors were looking for something deeper, because regardless of how we view the war, we should see everyone serving there – along with the civilians living there – as dear to us. For if we do not see these people as being just like ourselves, as being as important as we are, we have made them into objects disconnected from us.

Even though national polls now show people have little support for the war, there is still no major outcry from the public to end the war and bring the troops home immediately. Instead, we can continue on with our lives without being too inconvenienced by the loss of life occurring every hour this war continues. In this way, we have proved through our lack of action that we do not consider the people in Iraq and Afghanistan to be very dear to us. Like the characters in the biblical parable, we are able to pass by a ditch filled with wounded people and continue on our way without stopping to help.

Until we recognize that all of our lives are interconnected, atrocities can continue. If we don’t find dear ones when looking at the faces of Buddhist monks in Myanmar, uninsured sick children in the US, AIDS patients in Africa, or Afghani farmers struggling to feed their families, then we have lost our essential humanity. As Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables, to love another person is to see the face of God.