As we all grew up, most of us, in some way or other, wanted to make the world better. As young children, all we could do with our limited resources was to sing songs (Jesus Loves the Little Children) or contribute a portion of our allowance to some church fund or school charity or maybe save it for a later moral deposit. Don't know what it's like today, but back in the fifties and sixties, we had a cardboard box and we put in a nickel or dime or a few pennies now and then. Over the course of a year or two, the box got heavier and soon it had enough in it to leave back with a clear conscience.
If you grew up in a middle class, protestant neighborhood, making the world better was a matter of saving forlorn or lost souls, teaching people not as fortunate as you or I that there was a better way to happiness than to eke out a living by toiling on a plot of barren land the size of a normal American backyard. Living in the reasonably comfortable surroundings of a neighborhood with little crime and mothers who stayed at home to take care of the kids, there wasn't much an individual could do on his own. But then there were missionaries. They did it for us - vicariously. The missionaries were usually young couples in their thirties who stayed until they reached their fifties and sixties, had a baby or two in the meantime and got paid for teaching Christ to tribes of natives in darkest Africa. Every five years of so, they came back to the local community and told us heart-wrenching or praiseworthy stories of their experiences in teaching God's word to the heathen. After that, our little boxes got heavier much faster.
The missionary mentality is the same today, but it's not limited to Presbyterian propaganda or Episcopalian ecumenism. It has grown and expanded and become politically correct in a secular atmosphere. For purposes of money and power.
Lately, the thousandth American life was lost in the "freeing" of Iraq since the beginning of the American invasion/liberation (flip a coin for the correct choice). A large majority of Americans have been suckered into much the same kind of belief that I and my sisters and my friends back in the Midwest in the fifties were conned into.
Where is the agenda?
What they didn't tell us when we were children, was that there are other forces to be dealt with in life like money in the bank, nepotism, tribalism, greed, foreign investments, political influence, patterns of culture, lack of education and religious fanaticism. They didn't tell us that you could teach a tribe of lost souls in the heart of the Congo about Jesus but you couldn't teach them not to slaughter one another when they encroached on each other's privileges and cultural values.
The reason for this is simple. A pre-condition for making the world a better (democracy, freedom of choice, human values...) place to live in is dependent on knowing what you're doing in the first place. And to complicate the picture: if you've got a hidden agenda - and this includes self-delusions of religion, culture or democracy - you are doomed to fail.
I am thoroughly convinced that there are millions of Americans who honestly believe that we are engaged in a righteous war in Iraq, just as there were -and still are today - millions of Americans who continue to think that missionizing will make the world a better place for the needy peoples of the Third World. Preaching Christ and preaching Democracy are very much alike. But it you don't know who you are preaching to, your sermon will fall on deaf ears.
Now, I am still not convinced that purveying the message of democracy in both a theoretical and operative fashion is the one and only agenda for the powers to be in the United States. There is a lot at stake here. Political influence in the Middle East is vital to the economic interests of the Western World. But the fact remains. There are still many, many people who honestly believe that the most important item on the political agenda is a fostering of democratic values in a war-torn and devastated country. And this is, of course, an honorable stance to take.
But in order to effect a change in any culture - a Midwest farming community, an urban West Coast district, an Appalachian coal mining town, a Parisian or for that matter Swedish middle class set of attitudes or an extremely complicated and historically entrenched clash of subcultures in a country like Iraq that was formed with artificial boundaries, created at the whims of European colonialism, there must be a deep understanding of who you are dealing with. And this is not happening in Iraq, or for that matter in the pockets of cultural turbulence in the antiseptically architected slums of our cities and urban areas.
To be able to change the attitudes of anybody or anyone, you have to have done your homework. You have to know who you are speaking to and you have to respect their views and attitudes that are just as meaningful to them as yours are to you. If you can't do that then you will never be able to meet on even terms.
This is why we will fail in Iraq. One: our agenda is politically and economically dubious and Two: we are disrespectful of our counterpart. We are behaving like missionaries who teach small villages of thirsty and starving misfortunates to sing "Onward Christian Soldiers" by rote to the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar, when they cannot count or spell or make personal decisions in life based on a knowledge of the world around them. And giving them medicine to help them survive in a world of poverty is not enough.
1 comment:
Oo-oh, you speak the truth, Sir, you speak the truth!
BTW, how about posting some stories about... say, life in West Berlin in the sixties. Or smuggling bibles to wherever it was... England? Hmmm, probably not smuggling, huh? Or the Austrian monestary! Yeah!
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