as afghanistan once again embraces itself...

One of the distracting dangers of our 21st century interconnectivity involves seeing the pain and chaos of the world in real time and living color. We know that for the most part there is nothing we can actually DO with the suffering we've taken in. But like rubberneckers passing a wrecked car on the highway, we seem unable or unwilling to avert our eyes. Because we can, therefore we invariably do, only to wonder why we then feel emotionally drained, ethically impotent, and spiritually numb. Gazing upon the horrors of another's wound from a safe distance has become a cultural fetish: it evokes something like compassionate sentiments but fails to heal our hearts, change the facts on the ground, or satisfy our endless addiction to virtuous voyeurism. As chaos currently boils over the top of the cauldron that has become Kabul, where thousands await a promised but uncertain escape by air and millions try to reconcile themselves to the brutality yet to come, it is agonizingly hard not to look and then shake our head in resignation or despair.

This tragedy, however, need not become merely another masochistic encounter with privileged feelings that are temporarily disquieted only to be surrendered to our perpetually violent status quo. The late Dorothee Soelle, post-Holocaust liberation theologian from Germany, posits an alternative where the Holy Spirit empowers us to leave our "pervasive tendency toward passivity in the face of social evil, our massive failure of moral nerve that is the product of apatheia" which she defines as "our freedom from suffering and inability to suffer."

Christian apathy... prevents our realizing how profoundly involved in the life of God we actually are - God in us and we in God. (Carter Heyward)

The Spirit awakens our heart. It gives us eyes to see, a willingness to ignore the distractions of privilege, and the tenacity to resist our culture's conviction that compassion is simply too exhausting and costly to celebrate in real life. Over the past 20 years, our political. religious, and economic leaders have worked tirelessly to distract us, lie to us, and drive us into bourgeois inertia/apathy as they ruined yet another region of the world: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. NY Times columnist, Nicholas Kristoff, summarized it well:

So what went wrong? I don't disagree with the Biden administration for pulling out troops. Resources are limited, and if we couldn't defeat the Taliban with 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, I don't think we could have with 3,000. Corruption and lack of will destroyed the Afghan security forces, and I don't think we paid enough attention to the legitimacy and authenticity of those forces. Many Pashtuns I talked to over the years didn't like either the Taliban or the Afghan government, but they at least thought the Taliban were honest, albeit uneducated brutes. So if we had stayed another couple of years, I think we would merely have delayed the inevitable. I think of Vietnam: Should we have stayed two extra years and left in 1977? Probably not. That said, the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations all made mistakes that undermined our prospects. I was one of the first reporters to warn (many years ago) that we were losing ground in southern Afghanistan, partly because of corruption, and the refrain I always heard back was: Yes, we have problems, but in another year or so the Afghan army will be strong and able to take over. That was delusion. And of course Afghan leaders were corrupt and showed no leadership, and Pakistan quietly helped the Taliban, and there was a general fecklessness -- with the exception of the brave girls who risked so much to go to school.

In the confusing months after 9/11, moral action seemed clear: terrorism had to be thwarted. Our shared fear as Americans clouded our thinking so we united under the mantle of invasion. Rhetoric soon escalated into overt lies about weapons of mass destruction. Our obsession with slaying the dragon called Osama Bin Laden took on murderous proportions. And before most of us knew what was truly happening, our historic colonizing habits once again exploded throughout the Levant in ways that not only emboldened the Taliban, but giving birth to ISIS, too. The current Biden administration may have misread aspects of the Taliban's prowess - the stunning collapse of the US supported regime was bewildering - but the President is getting close to truth-telling by acknowledging that the US and our allies should never have started this shameful and deadly adventure in the first pace. In countless ways, Biden is pushing us to live into the wisdom of this moment in time which is ALL about modesty and accepting limits. Mr. Biden is not perfect, nor are all his words transparent. But he realizes, as does his team and millions of other Americans, that reality is calling us down a different path.

 

That is why I have no tolerance for those toadies on the Right who are already trying to smear President Biden with the blood of innocent Afghans. Make no mistake, we KNOW there will be incomprehensible quantities of blood to come. That was set in motion hours after the Taliban attacks of September 11, 2001 and systematically sacralized for two decades by Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump. It is disingenuous war-mongering - callous and unprincipled manipulation of our better angels, too - for analysts like Bret Stephens to cry crocodile tears today in anticipation of the likely slaughter of innocents. In today's NY Times, Stephens' flogs our collective conscience with deceptive appeals to solidarity and pseudo-patriotism writing: 

Watch — if you have the stomach — videos of the aftermath of an attack in May on Afghan schoolgirls, which left 90 dead, or the massacre of 22 Afghan commandos in June, gunned down as they were surrendering, or Taliban fighters taunting an Afghan police officer, shortly before they kill him for the crime of making comic videos. One Taliban official declared that their jihad was directed not against ordinary Afghans but only “against the occupiers and those who defend the occupiers.” Yet the list of Afghans who fill that bill reaches into the thousands, if not higher. Women will become chattel. There are roughly 18 million women and girls in Afghanistan. They will now be subject to laws from the seventh century. They will not be able to walk about with uncovered faces or be seen in public without a male relative. They will not be able to hold the kinds of jobs they’ve fought so hard to get over the last 20 years: journalists, teachers, parliamentarians, entrepreneurs. Their daughters will not be allowed to go to school or play sports or consent to the choice of a husband.

Truth-telling, however, requires more than temporarily ruffled emotional feathers. Living by faith requires clear eyes to see, open ears to hear, and loving hearts to act beyond all the distractions and hyperbole. As with the current ecological crisis, this is an era of limits. Columnist Tom Friedman whispers what this might look like when he confesses:

For years, U.S. officials used a shorthand phrase to describe America’s mission in Afghanistan. It always bothered me: We are there to train the Afghan Army to fight for their own government. That turned out to be shorthand for everything that was wrong with our mission — the idea that Afghans didn’t know how to fight and just one more course in counterinsurgency would do the trick. Really? Thinking you need to train Afghans how to fight is like thinking you need to train Pacific Islanders how to fish. Afghan men know how to fight. They’ve been fighting one another, the British, the Soviets or the Americans for a long, long time. It was never about the way our Afghan allies fought. It was always about their will to fight for the corrupt pro-American, pro-Western governments we helped stand up in Kabul. And from the beginning, the smaller Taliban forces — which no superpower was training — had the stronger will, as well as the advantage of being seen as fighting for the tenets of Afghan nationalism: independence from the foreigner and the preservation of fundamentalist Islam as the basis of religion, culture, law and politics. In oft-occupied countries like Afghanistan, many people will actually prefer their own people as rulers (however awful) over foreigners (however well intentioned).

Beyond the obvious need to get as many US citizens and their allies out of Kabul as fast as possible, including the families of interpreters, reality has called us into yet another reckoning with our collective and destructive history. Last summer, we began to own the legacy of white privilege and our heinous violence against black and brown people. We were awakened, too to anti-Asian discrimination and the

hollowness of our mythology re: rugged individualism that is now seen as totally dysfunctional in the age of contagion. With the so-called collapse of Afghanistan, some are able to see a bit more clearly that our reckoning must include American adventurism and exploitation. A nation built upon colonial genocide is going to have a hard time coming to grips with our true story. It is paradoxical. It is still unfolding. It is horrible as well as holy, filled with beauty right next to viscous brutality. I choose to believe that young Amanda Gorman helped move us a step closer when she proclaimed "the hill we climb..."

When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade
We've braved the belly of the beast

We've learned that quiet isn't always peace
And the norms and notions
of what just is
Isn't always just-ice
And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we've weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn't broken
but simply unfinished

But the jury is still out. Tonight my heart is sad: I love my people - and my homeland - even as my soul joins others in lamentation. I will watch 30 minutes of the news machine and pray with my tears. But then I will renew my focus with this old prayer Dr. Soelle used to share:

Why are you so one-sided

people often ask me

so blind and so unilateral

I sometimes ask in return

are you a christian

if you don't mind my asking

And depending on the answer I remind them

how one-sidedly and without guarantees

god made himself vulnerable in christ...

...god didn't come in an armored car

and wasn't born in a bank

and gave up the old miracle weapons

thunder and lightening and heavenly hosts

one-sidedly

places and kinds and soldiers

were not his way when he

decided unilaterally

to become a human being

which means to live without weapons

Let me add that the alternative of virtuous voyeurism and its corresponding despair is what one wise old soul called the 10 foot rule. We can do very little for those in Afghanistan (except, of course, donate to the UNHCR @ https://www. unhcr.org/en-us/). But we CAN reach out and touch someone in need close by: the synergy of authentic compassion is simply doing our small part within the immediacy of our lives. Within 10 feet of our home. Our place of worship. Our work. This is how our ideals - and the word of God - becomes flesh. O Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.