I've been thinking about the horrible two weeks we've just been through.
BY RICK THYNE
CONTENT ADVISORY FOR READERS:
Today’s essay directly discusses both current and historical instances of violence, including current experiences of violence endured by people in Israel and Palestine recently; violence experienced by civilians in the Vietnam War; racial hate crimes and acts of domestic terrorism against Black Americans, including lynching; and U.S. school shootings.
Obviously this is deeply distressing and difficult material to read about; this essay also contains some photos of that violence, some graphic. For any readers for whom this is too much, feel free to stop right here and skip this essay; no graphic content will appear until further down in the essay past the initial image.
On Saturday, October 7th, Hamas terrorists from Gaza breached Israeli security fences and slaughtered hundreds of Jews, many of them babies, children, and young adults at a music festival. Within days, Israel was bombing neighborhoods in Gaza, indiscriminately killing both terrorists and the civilians among whom the terrorists imbed themselves, turning off electricity and water, food supplies and medical assistance for these ragged, impoverished Palestinians.
Sadly, this conflict has been going on for most of my life; I was seven years old when modern Israel was created after World War Two, and I’ve watched through all these years as hope for a resolution of the conflict has been swallowed up by yet another failure. And here we are again, as the killing mounts.
For much of the world, our understanding of the global community has moved in the past few centuries from tribalism’s insistence that my people are superior to your people, to a deep awareness that we are all human beings, with common ancient ancestors and common DNA. Wherever we live, whatever our tribe or color or ethnicity, whether we worship a god or not, we share this common human condition. The only way I can justify killing my opponent’s innocents is to regress to tribal thinking, to dehumanize my enemy, to see them as less than I and my tribe are, and therefore less worthy of life and prosperity.
Having lived through America’s 9/11 attacks, Boko Haram’s slaughter in Nigeria and other African states, and now Hamas’s reign of terror, if I tell you, which is true, that I believe there is no moral equivalency to terrorists’ rage and slaughter, some of you will tell me that I don’t understand the horrors of Palestinian oppression. If I tell you, which is true, that I think Israel’s treatment of Palestinians over several decades is politically and morally indefensible, some of you will label me an antisemite. If I tell you, which is true, that I believe that Hamas does not represent the citizens of Gaza who, therefore, should not be crushed along with the terrorists, some of you will tell me that Gaza’s citizens voted Hamas into power and are therefore responsible for the terrorism that has been loosed on Israel and worthy of whatever horror Israel rains down on them.
What these two weeks have taught me is that, once again, we have regressed to this primitive tribalism. It is difficult to talk about all of this reasonably. Whatever our convictions, our hair is on fire from the carnage and horror that we’re witnessing, each of us from our own perspective. So whatever we say, there are those who will find us absolutely wrong or only partially correct when complete prejudice is required. When your hair is on fire, nuanced reasoning and any form of empathy go up in smoke.
Perhaps this is my escape from these uncompromising arguments, but for me, these arguments about who is right and who is wrong, who is the perpetrator of violence and who the victims, are secondary. The narrative neither side wants to consider, and which we’re reluctant to focus on because it is so awful, is the magnitude of human suffering inscribed on the bodies of this and every war’s innocent victims. I can argue the complexities of middle eastern politics, but I’m more focused on what’s happening to the casualties who are too young or too old or too weak to carry a weapon or leverage an opinion on the fate that awaits them. Like all such conflicts, this one is about the killing fields on which children’s and women’s and old men’s bodies are marred with pain and death in the name of my side’s righteous indignation at your side’s brutality.
So far, I’ve resisted scanning the news for photos of bullet-riddled corpses, decapitations, rape, and pillage. In fact, I already have a gruesome gallery in my memory, photos from horrific public moments in my past that remind me of what violence looks like not in theory or from the point of view of some political ideology, but when it is inscribed on human bodies, Jewish or Palestinian, Black or Brown or white, soldier or terrorist, rape victims or bloodied children.
These faces and torsos are inevitably the portraits of people without power who are always the ones who suffer most when people in power engage in violent mayhem. These photos remind me of awful experiences that shaped my convictions and led me to where I now stand, with my focus on the marginalized victims of war, especially the children.
These faces and torsos are inevitably the portraits of people without power who always are the ones who suffer most when people in power engage in violent mayhem.
By March of 1968, the answer to the question of our savage role in the unnecessary killing of Vietnamese civilians was no longer in doubt. American soldiers herded hundreds of civilians into a small hamlet, Mi Lai, and massacred them. One summary of the killings put it this way: The men were killed, while many of the women were also raped, their bodies mutilated, and their children slaughtered right in front of them. In the end, 347 (the American count) or 504 (the Vietnamese count) lay dead in stacks of corpses. Lieutenant William Calley was the only soldier convicted of this crime, though dozens more, all of them American soldiers, were identified as active participants. We did this. Young American men of my generation. With all of our freedoms and privileges, when we dehumanize our enemy, we are still capable of regressing to savagery.
In a photo from 1972, a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl, Kim Phuc, runs in painful panic, her skin seared with fragments of the napalm we rained down on her country. When I first saw this photo, it startled me at the carnage we were inflicting not only on soldiers and government leaders, but on innocent civilians. It was the first of such horrific photos hung forever in my mind. Fifty years later, this photo was judged the top photo on a list of those that changed the world.
Emmett Louis Till was born July 25th, 1941, thirty-eight days after my birth on June 17th of that years. When I first heard of his story in my twenties, I realized how lucky I was to be white and living in Hollywood, California, and not Black in the south. Emmett lived in Chicago and was visiting family in Money, Mississippi in 1955. On the evening of August 28th, he whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham. There is some debate about whether he actually whistled or whether the woman made up her accusation; but given what happened to Emmett, does it really matter whether or not he whistled?
Four days later, he was murdered. The white woman’s husband and his half-brother kidnapped Emmett, made him carry a 75-pound cotton gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River, and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head and then threw his body, tied to the cotton gin fan with barbed wire, into the river. When his bloated body was retrieved, his mother returned her murdered son to Chicago for a memorial service and burial. She left the coffin open so his friends – and through this photo, the rest of us – could see what happened to him, not just for whistling at a white woman but for being less than human in the eyes of the culture that murdered him.
Emmett Till was not the only one murdered for his color. This is a photo of three of the nearly 4,000 Black Americans who were lynched in campaigns of terror to keep them from the freedom to vote. The young Black men dangling in death are horrible to see, but my eyes are drawn more forcefully to the crowd around them. Some in the all-white crowd are smiling at the camera, as if this is an entertainment they’ve all gathered to enjoy. Not a single one looks horror stricken, which can only mean they’ve convinced themselves that what it happening to these Black men is happening to people who are not human like they are, men whose death is simply a part of the defense of their superior white culture.
Lest we think this attitude is behind us, in the past decade there are reports of at least five men who were lynched in our country, four Black men and one Latino.
Finally, there is the issue of gun violence. We disagree among ourselves about the right to own and use an AR-15, or whether such weapons of war are barbaric in civilian hands. And we barely glance at the less dramatic gun deaths that happen to children, one by one, often in their own homes or neighborhoods. Gun deaths among U.S. children and teens rose 50% between 2019 and 2021 and are the leading cause of death for children between one and nineteen years of age. Stop for a moment to think about this: gun deaths, not drunk driving accidents or childhood cancer, are the leading cause of death among our children.
For decency’s sake, we don’t show pictures of children slaughtered by these weapons in school mass shootings. But there is this:
These are the same green Converse on her feet that turned out to be the only clear evidence that could identify her after the shooting
said actor Matthew McConaughey, who was born in Uvalde, Texas, in an interview after the 2022 mass school shooting there that killed nineteen children and two teachers. The fact that Maite Rodriguez was identified mainly by her sneakers and other students by DNA tests is because of the horrendous damage inflicted by the AR-15 assault rifle used in this and other mass shootings. McConaughey said,
[these dead children] needed extensive restoration. Why? Due to the exceptionally large exit wounds of an AR-15. Most of the bodies [were] so mutilated that only DNA test[s] and green Converse could identify 'em.
Here’s a horrific sentence from a recent review of the book America’s Gun: The Story of the AR-15:
[when tested, an] AR-15’s [bullet] became unstable upon entry, and tore through the body like a tornado, spiraling and tipping as it obliterated organs, blood vessels and bones.
Americans now own twenty million AR-15s.
Such grotesque reality leaves me with little tolerance for arguments about twenty million American civilians’ right to use AR-15s, and a deepening commitment to do anything I can to save children from the brutal death these weapons inflict.
It’s been a horrible couple of weeks in which we’ve had to contemplate the massive number of deaths in Israel and Gaza. Halfway through the two weeks it took me to write this essay, I went to church. Near the beginning of the service, twenty-five teenage singers and one young violinist performed on the chancel steps, singing a piece with this chorus: So take my hand – don’t let go.
I couldn’t help myself: I imagined two-hundred-fifty of our kids not singing in church but running from a dance concert, gunned down one by one, dying in the sand. Or twenty-five thousands of them, with their little sisters, brothers, and cousins, walking behind donkey-driven carts and crowded in the beds of trucks, making their way, without food, water, or medical care, from north to south in Gaza. I imagine all of them looking to us, to the adults in the conversation, pleading with us, Take my hand – don’t let go.