My rage from yesterday, and some of the response to it, brings up the question of how we get past dehumanization, about how we rehumanize one another. (Jodie Foster seeks the Oscar in The Brave One opening this week.)
It’s easy to dehumanize. The terrorists responsible for 9-11 were animals, were evil, must be destroyed. The people who sent them, the same. The people who supported them, the same. The countries which harbor them, the same. The countries which support them, the same. All who speak up for them, the same. All who would humanize them, the same.
Hatred is a process that spreads in ever-widening circles, until you want whole populations dead, until you become the very thing you thought you were fighting against, all your enemy says you are.
The so-called War on Terror is a unique conflict in that it is
framed as a war against war, a war against the fear which leads to war,
a war on behalf of peace. When terror is matched by terror, we have
learned, terror wins. Always.
Yet how can we be touched by "the better angels of our nature"
when we’re grieving, when we’re enraged, when we’re violated, when
being brave is defined as killing the other and extending the cycle of
violence indefinitely?
This is a question George W. Bush, the Republican Party, the war
advocates, the neocons, and the media have never touched. Not once, in
all these long years. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, they say. You
can’t unring the bell, they say. We can’t bring the towers back, and we can’t
un-invade Iraq.
The answer to this question in the past has always been justice, justice tempered by
mercy, justice whose aim is reconciliation, rehabilitation,
rehumanization, for victim and violator both. This is what marked our
success after World War II, it’s what Lincoln himself sought shortly before he died:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the
work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who
shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all
which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves
and with all nations.
We have a model for ending hatred, in our own world, in our own
time. It takes time, and it takes will, to rehumanize one another. It’s
not an easy process. The better angels of our nature are those which
are hardest to follow, those which demand the most from us, from each
of us. From both sides, Republican and Democrat, from Muslim and
Christian and Jew:
Who will bend this ancient hatred, will the killing to an end
Who will swallow long injustice, take the devil for a country man
Who will end this war on terror? And how?
