Four Bakr Boys in the Sand
An essay from 2015
I remember days like this, when the world seemed to crack open and people fell down the cliffs into nothing. The day a sick kid took a cache of military weapons into a grade school; the day the planes did not land on the ground but in buildings and trees; the letters with white powder; the people firing at strangers in the capital of my country like so many others; the children running on the beach yesterday and shot by something that made their appendages fly off. They are Palestinian. Does this matter?
When it looked like peace was possible eight years ago, a group of men ended it for both sides, for these children who died yesterday. Is it their fault? Can we all just blame them?
I remember the starts of at least two wars, but I have not had to fight. I marvel with disgust and gratitude at the privilege of getting to comment on rather than be compelled by accidents of birth, ancestry, nationality or location to participate in the violence. No war or famine is pressing upon me. I am safe from impending state violence. Neither of today’s catastrophes have anything to do with me except I am human and I believe in a God who loves us. And I am sorry that we do this, that we justify it, that we sometimes count the bodies if they matter to us but do not count them if it is decided they do not — that some dead bodies are worth more than others. And they are no different than me, they were just born somewhere else.
Today tanks roll into a bleak neighborhood where there is little water or electricity and the elected representatives hide weapons in abandoned schools. Then across the continent a plane is shot out of the sky. No one should live the way most of humanity lives, but they do. We accept both. Enough of us live well enough. I wonder if my brilliant and hilarious friend in Jerusalem is safe — he has four children. They are Jewish. Does this matter?
I try to pivot. Two dear friends had their first children last week, and they are married to loving, devoted men. These babies will be held and nursed and rocked and soothed. They will have the best possible chance at not being broken. They will be seen and watched over. They will play. My aunt and uncle are married forty-four years today. Despite what he saw in a horrible war, he is gentle and kind; he fixes motors and machines. He loves a loud and vivacious woman. I am surrounded by people who were dying but did not; now they live and breathe life into others. We get to heal one another. People whose hearts are no different than mine can celebrate their love in more and more places and face less recrimination. And one day, I may have autonomy over my body not because of where I work or my income but because I am a person.
I try not to think about my angry countrymen on the border screaming at poor and terrified children, telling them to go home to their countries where gangs outnumber police, all carrying the guns we sold them to protect the drugs we buy from them under the noses of dictators we installed for them. I am sorry that fleeing families believed they would be safe in a country of immigrants, where we come from everywhere. It is not my child or yours on that beach or in that shot-up school or behind the border wall. The graves of my loved ones are marked; they have not been bulldozed.
I marvel at the hatred I see in myself and I see in us all. We hide from it; we pretend we do not hate. We think we can be good and right at the same time, that our superior nationality justifies our every action. We don’t question our leaders if they are members of the same party as the last person we voted for. We think we are better and smarter and more rational in everything that we do simply because we are us. Whatever personal humility any of us can practice, as a nation we evince little. We want to win at any cost. We fight just to save face. We disavow consequences and feign innocence. We stand by, we permit more suffering.
Does it matter that I feel good or bad about the world — that I pray? That I am determined to be good or that instead I despair, too exhausted to try to reduce the violence? That I can change and that I can forgive — even myself? I know a lot of people who can change, who know a lot about forgiveness, who can repair.
I do not think the world needs me to be comfortable or comforted. But it could use my love, my self-awareness that hatred is in me as it is in you. Being able to connect, in the stillness between rages, in the torture of grieving parents, and even in hopelessness, is powerful. The only moral use for power I have ever known is hope. The time for morality would have been before the boys died on the beach today.
