. . . makes the whole world blind.
As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality. Man, for instance,cannot be untruthful, cruel or incontinent and claim to have God on his side.
-Mahatma Gandhi
To say that I'm outraged and saddened by the attacks in London yesterday both states the obvious and doesn't say enough. London is one of my favorite places in the world. It was a dry run, in many ways, for my life in New York, and it's a repository of many of my early urban dreams and my love of history's tangible elements. In London, I began to learn how to live like a true urbanite, as opposed to the sheltered dabbling in the art I'd done in Pittsburgh and Toronto. I first learned the etiquette of the subway while riding the Tube between my spartan student quarters in Tooting Bec on the Northern Line and Covent Garden in Central London: take up as little space as possible, expect to be jostled, don't invade people's privacy by making eye contact. Preserve a little human dignity by pretending we're not all squashed in here like cattle.
London was the first truly big city I visited and explored, the place I first began to understand the way people live together in large urban areas, to learn the many aspects of the pact city dwellers make with each other when living in such close quarters. I also learned how paradoxically simultaneously fragile and strong that pact is. There were riots in Brixton the first year I went to London, the kind of event that had spread in Detroit in earlier years into the gutting of the city, but even when I stayed briefly in Brixton, there was a sense that it was an isolated event, not a war. London would hold together in a way Detroit had not. Perhaps it was sheer mass holding it together, the way Los Angeles had survived the Watts riots, but I think it was also a fundamental sense that everyone belonged there that the citizens of Detroit, white and black, had long lacked. At some point, Detroit's cohesiveness had broken down and then the white flight began, leaving a deeply divided city behind In the same way,.the bombers who struck yesterday broke that fundamental pact of trust ant citizenship forged between residents of large cities.
Yesterday, I suspect it was the also same pact and a deep sense of belonging, the same one that brought London through the Blitz, that allowed the city to get itself up and running again so rapidly. Attacked from outside, rather than by it's own, London picked itself up and shook itself off and got on with it. One woman, literally bloodied by the experience, refused aid saying she just needed to get to work. That might have been shock talking, but I suspect it was as much determination as anything.
Ian McEwan, in an editorial in the New York Times today, writes, "It is unlikely that London will claim to have been transformed in an instant, to have lost its innocence in the course of a morning. It is hard to knock a huge city like this off its course. It has survived many attacks in the past." London has been dealing with similar attacks by the IRA for years, but with the fundamental difference of advance warnings that almost make the IRA bombings seem civilized by comparison. And, of course, there was The Blitz, still in the living memories of many Brits. Unlike New York, London has seen centuries of violence and destruction: civil wars, invading forces, enormous fires, plague, riot, storms and floods. The city endures. Its citizens endure.
Of course, no matter how heroic and stoic the actions of the victims, after something like this happens, the first impulse, the immediate need, is to assign blame, and I'm not above that. The people who set off those bombs yesterday may have lived in London—some of them for quite some time—but they were not truly citizens, any more than they were, as Franklin Roosevelt once said of Americans, "citizens of the world." Sadly, I don't think the US as a nation is truly a citizen of the world anymore either. It was other hands that set the timers, but part of the responsibility for those bombs rests on the shoulders of George W. Bush and his greedy, unChristian, inhumane blood-for-oil foreign policy of naked aggression against peaceful states. Al Qaida may have struck here first, but Al Qaida is not and never was Iraq, and invading that country only further enraged extremists and alienated allies. As one London Muslim said, "People hate the foreign policy of Britain and the United States, and the West needs to consider whether constant interference in the Muslim world is productive." There are many causes for extremism of any kind, including so-called Christian extremism, but acting with love and respect toward ones fellow humans is not one of them. And love does not kill.
If people who profess Christianity cannot curb their own violence and greed, what example does that set for non-Christians? What recommendation does that make for Christianity as the Light of the World? As Gandhi said, we must be the change we would see in the world.
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