The real source of unrest in Egypt is not outside agitators or inside Muslim fundamentalists. It's suppressed dissent from those starving, falsely arrested and in prison, disappeared, tortured and murdered by the regime.
In a Fox news interview last Friday, Senator McCain warned our nation that insurrection against our allied governments in the Middle East may very well spread like a virus. "This, I would argue, is probably the most dangerous period of history in…our entire involvement in the Middle East, at least in modern times."
McCain is right: This is an extremely dangerous period in history.
McCain is also wrong: It's not like a virus, something that infects us quickly, needs symptomatic relief, then leaves in a week or two. That's Mubarak's misdiagnosis too.
It's more like a cancer. Mubarak is still applying his worn out quick fix with jail, police and his thugs, and the numbers of demonstrators grow. There's no longer an easy way to stop the unrest in Egypt. Relief of symptoms by forcing the evacuation of "Freedom Square" would be catastrophic.
The cancer should have been stopped decades ago. There were easier solutions then. Such preemptive ways to heal society are known in all major religions, from thousands of years ago.
Some 2,000 years ago a famous Chinese doctor, renowned as a physician and for his skill and knowledge of medicines and his ability to heal even the most deadly disease, was asked why he was so much better than his two brothers, who were also doctors. His answer:
My first brother heals sickness before it even develops. His methods are quiet. His science is an art form of diagnosis and treatment, preventing disease. He is known only within our village. My second brother deals with illnesses while they are beginning to emerge, preventing sickness from getting worse and out of control. His methods return the body to health without risky intervention. I deal with sicknesses when they have reached the level of disease and threaten the very life of the person. This requires numerous medicines, and skill and knowledge in their use.
It's true my name has become famous throughout the kingdom and I have been asked to be physician to the king. Yet my first brother has the knowledge to deal with sicknesses before they arise and my second brother is able to treat them at an early stage and prevent them getting worse. Though my fame has spread throughout the land, their knowledge is greater, and their accomplishments as physicians more important and powerful for healing
—(Adapted from The Tao of Peace by Wang Chen).
Our children remember 1993, when we picked up a book tossed on our front lawn full of warnings of Jewish encroachment in Montana. I read it. I remember that the core venom of hatred for Jews was shrouded in layers of fervent Christian faith and deep patriotism. I quickly discovered other Hardin families found a copy on their front lawn as well. Everyone I visited with saw through the patriotic Christian layers to the anti-Semitism.
It was worse in Billings. KKK fliers were distributed, the Jewish cemetery was desecrated, the home of a Native American family was painted with swastikas, and a brick was thrown through the window of a six-year-old boy who displayed a Menorah for Hanukkah.
Remember what the Billings Gazette did then? A full-page picture of a Menorah was posted voluntarily, so citizens could display it in their front windows all over town. Some 10,000 citizens responded by displaying a Menorah, identifying themselves with the hated ones.
The hatred was beaten back. The cancer threatening our communities was stopped by people who dared confront the hatred with God's power. The ideology did not spread.
As I watched and read the extremist rhetoric today claiming "all Muslims" are bent on total annihilation of Christians, it was almost beyond belief that our national media could successfully peddle such juvenile tit-for-tat, especially to the good citizens of Big Horn County. I'm reminded of my two grandsons' tit-for-tat, absolutely convinced the other was about to rob the gold dollar gift recently available at our banks, provided by an unnamed grandparent. I was also reminded of similar rhetoric against Jews and Blacks in those books on our lawns in 1993. Inflammatory fearful rhetoric is an easy tool for politicians and pundits here too.
This is the cancer nurtured by Mubarak to infect the thugs paid to beat, stab and shoot demonstrators. We in America now need to apply a more powerful antidote to the threat Senator McCain has erroneously compared to a virus. Let's try God's words, written by the Prophet Isaiah 3000 years ago:
Thus says the Lord: Share your bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed and the homeless, free the prisoner; then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your wound shall quickly heal.
If you remove from your midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech, if you bestow your bread on the hungry and heal the afflicted, then light shall rise for you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday.
—Isaiah 58:7, 9-10, adapted from The Common Lectionary for Feb 6, 2011
All over America we now share in the world's suffering. The world's cancerous epidemic of structural violence to suppress those marginalized into silence by drugs, poverty and prisons is here too. There are more people of dark skin now incarcerated, disenfranchised from voting and outside the functioning economy, than the number disenfranchised by slavery a decade before our civil war. Employment is rampant, and many more young families cannot find means to survive meaningfully in America. While arrests for illegal drug possession and sales are practically equal across racial lines, if one found guilty is a person of color, that one is ten times more likely to serve a long prison sentence.
Like in Egypt, here in America this is not a matter of political and religious prejudice. The cancer runs to the core of the human rights: access to a place of respect within the community regardless of race, economic status, or gender issues.
Associated with the cancer in America is the emotional framing label, "Big Government." Everyone says it's bad, and I agree. But note the hypocrisy of those with the loudest cries against big government: they want that government exerting it's power into our homes and close relationships, telling us who can get medical care, who we as adults can choose as our spouse for legal protection for our relationship with our significant other as adults, and lobbying for the government to restrict the reproductive rights of those outside the middle class.
These controversial problems in America occur because we still fail to address the injustices that have in the past turned into major unrest. Instead, like when Johnson's "war on poverty" died a premature death, we have become preoccupied with a war against the poor. We have economic gurus defending wealth redistribution, not from the top down, but from the rest of us up. Instead of a draft, which created a military demography of equality like in Egypt, we have a hundred thousand trapped outside the economy unless they sign up for military service. For the first time in America, almost none of our government officials placing our service people into harms way have sons or daughters sharing that risk. Inflamed by "death tax" rhetoric, we are creating a government and economy led by vested inherited wealth, totally against the economic principles clearly elucidated in the foundation of our nation (See Tom Payne).
So now in America, more people than ever before are suffering because of a big government gone awry under the auspices of big money. It's time to look at resources to help us understand this outside the media owned by government/corporate complexes.
On line, these resources are many. Haa'aretz, Al Jazeera, Alternet, Democracy Now, Consortium News, Sojourners Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, The Huffington Post, and many more. These get little corporate funding, and depend on concerned citizen contributions. They restore the function of the main commercial media before the equal time law was rescinded over a decade ago. Before then, investigative independent journalism was central to our free press tradition. Now it's virtually nonexistent, except outside the main commercial media.
Unrest, conflicting interests and resulting suppression are increasing problems worldwide, providing motivation for people driven to desperation by real or imagined fears to act upon those fears violently. That's why we may have an escalation of incidents like the recent one in Tucson. Fortunately, we have a wonderful precedent in this country of addressing potentially catastrophic conflict when confronted by major social changes, as in the civil rights era of the 60's. See my previous column, in the archives of the Big Horn County News http://www.bighorncountynews.com
or below for the complete column version of "What would MLK Say."
The best way to deal with this social pathology is to go to the root of the problem with real transparency, access to sustainable economy for families, and programs that address real problems of real families honestly and with the best appropriate technology. Dealing with our needs to grow and change as a nation when the needs affect the common citizens of our country is the time. We have done it before. Now, Egypt gives us a reason to do it again. Those who object, claiming our country is so much better than all the other nations, are following a route destructive of the values our founding fathers promoted. Let's not go backward as a nation to the values of King George and the Redcoats in 1776. Let's go forward.
So far, we have escalated building prisons and incarcerating the marginalized. Many criminologists know this is not
the best for our country. It's much better to have a fair economy, a fair health delivery program, a fair, healthy and transparent agriculture and food production enterprise, and a military under the control of the citizens of this country instead controlled by a humongous and powerful military industrial complex.
But in recent times the media has been largely stolen by interests that inflame, instill fear, and agitate us on agendas that sidetrack us to the real issues, the real cancer of oppression eating at the core of our nation and the world.
So Egyptians in Cairo, especially those with an anti-American rhetoric in the demonstrations, are a gift to us in America. Listen to them. We have in America the proven capacity to make major changes in our laws and the structure of our economy. We can see the evil, hear the evil, and set about to do what needs to be done.
How do we know which of the media pundits we should listen to? The Bible again is clear. "…For our warfare is not against flesh and blood." So wrote St. Paul, to the Ephesians caught in a similar religious/political civil conflict.
Whenever we hear a pundit or politician inciting us to hatred against a particular group of people, focusing on the identity of the group or individual as a terrible threat to our nation and worthy to be eliminated, let's forget it.
Whenever we hear of someone doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly among the world's peoples before God, let's follow that person.
It really is simple: those of us who are Christian, let's read the Gospels on what Jesus was like, what he did and said, and copy him. Or copy Paul as he told us to do, because he imitates Jesus. Those of us connected to another religion, I have a hunch this antidote against our plague of cancerous hatred is there too.
Organizations and religious groups connecting to this way of healing our nation and world are many. Search these on your browser:
Christian Peacemaker Teams
The Third Side (Harvard University)
Muslim Peacemaker Teams
American Friends Service Committee
Baptist Peace Fellowship
Sojourners Magazine
Southern Christian Leadership Council
Amity International
Over a thousand university peace studies departments worldwide
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David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
