As I write, the war on Iraq is essentially over. Many journalists and dozens of coalition forces lost their lives in “friendly fire” incidents. Soldiers on all sides – most with families who depend on them – died in ground fighting. The massive bombing of Baghdad and other cities led to untallied numbers of dead civilian men, women and children. Each loss is final, irrecoverable. Those who die will not benefit from Iraq’s “liberation.” Their families face irrecoverable loss. And those with permanent physical and emotional injuries face a lifetime of hardship. Yet it all seems curiously unmourned by public officials. There have been a few clips of leaders offering brief words of condolence, but in public at least, they have shed no tears.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
It was not a time for tears, we were told. It was a time for “shock and awe,” for pride in the massive American military machine or for Iraqi nationalism. Yet even if the war was the lesser of great evils, as those in charge claim (although I believe there were less evil options), one can hardly imagine that the appropriate response ought to be pride or awe. For no matter what oppressions it seeks to redress, war accomplishes its goals through death and destruction. And the first, most appropriate, response to death is lament. Without public expressions of grief, the horror is turned into spectacle, the grim act of killing into the business of modern warfare.
Public lament rejects the language of “collateral damage,” “airborne sanitation” or “strategic targets” that I have heard used many times. It refuses to obscure the nature of the harm being done.
To some extent, it was the millions of ordinary folks who protested in streets across the world who carried the burden of public lament. Whether or not one supported their position, they offered a vital gift to the world. Public lament allows a people to tell the truth about themselves, to be honest before each other and God, to grieve and groan in the face of great suffering. Even those who conclude that war may be the least evil option are more likely to keep the evil to a minimum when they are honest about its harm, when they mourn it deeply.
Evil thrives, you see, when flanked by its twin bodyguards of denial and destiny. They help to protect destructive policies from exposure and critique. Denial suppresses pain signals. It prevents us from properly diagnosing social problems. It treats sufferers as insignificant or weak or immoral; asserts that there are no other options. It presents only a single path to the future and treats any misery associated with that path as necessary “growing pains.” Both denial and destiny have been hard at work in Iraq and the West to justify Saddam Hussein’s oppression and George Bush’s war.
We were not directly involved in this war, but most of us have seen the death-dealing effects of denial and destiny in our experience with agricultural communities.
Denial is the shame-induced silence that descends around a farm family or town business when it can no longer pay its debts. Denial suppresses the destructive effects of excessive competition between farmers, allowing giant companies to quietly soak up most of the profit in the food system. Destiny is the fatalism that accepts the depopulation of rural towns, the dismantling of their social institutions, with a “well that’s the cost of progress” attitude. Denial represses the stories of rural poverty and lost dreams.
Destiny tells instead the stories of “heroic perseverance” – of a steady march of progress from homesteading to the present. I’ve sat with many rural folks caught in deep depression, considering suicide, because destiny and denial had robbed them of hope, of community
support.
It is public lament that undermines the power of these bodyguards of evil. It brings the painful heartaches that rob us of sleep in the dark hours of the night into daylight, into church prayers and preaching, into street protests, into public media and community forums. In so doing it rips away the veil of shame and lies that keep our problems from being addressed. It helps us put our finger on the real causes of evil. It provides support for those who suffer. And it gives us a chance to mourn the losses that the world inflicts so that we can move on to building a better one.
Cam Harder is associate professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Western Producer.
