If You Can’t See that This War is Wrong…

There comes a point at which, if you can’t see how something is wrong, I can’t explain it any further. You either have empathy or you don’t.

There’s no syllogism I can quote to you that will make you lead a moral life. There’s no set of rules that comprehends everything a Christian ought to do in every possible situation, without your actually having to deliberate and think. To lead a moral life, you have to have empathy.

The foundation of all of Catholic social teaching is, “love your neighbor as yourself.” Catholic social teaching evolves when we realize we haven’t loved our neighbor as we ought. Sinners convert and become saints, when they start to love their neighbor as themselves.

If you can’t choose to think of a fellow human being as a fellow human being, with the same value and similar needs as yourself, then you cannot follow the Golden Rule, and you’ll be lost.

If there’s anybody who falls outside of your empathy, you need to be converted, and bring them in. And so do I: I’m a sinner too. We all need to have empathy for other human beings.

I can scarcely keep track of all the horrors going on in the Middle East right now. Last I checked, we were nearly certain that American Tomahawk missiles destroyed the girls’ school, killing more than a hundred little children. Iran seems to have bombed a desalination plant in Bahrain and I don’t know who bombed the desalination plant in Iran, but now thousands of people are in danger of losing clean drinking water. Israel has bombed the oil refineries in Tehran, clouding the city in a miniature nuclear winter of jet-black clouds. Sunday morning, black, oily rain fell from the sky. Oil coated the ground and the windshields of cars. Nine million people are breathing in toxic gas. In a few years, the survivors will start to develop cancer.  This is not normal or all right.

I know that American politicians have been lobbing bombs at the Middle East as their way of saying “look over there!” and changing the subject since well before I was born. I’ve written about this before. This is what America does. I’ll be forty-two years old in October, and I can’t remember an America that doesn’t bomb the Middle East.

But the fact that something is to be expected doesn’t make it all right.

It is unspeakably immoral that the United States opened up this conflict by bombing a school, murdering over 150 little girls. Little girls aren’t enemy combatants. That bombing is a crime and a mortal sin.

It is horrific that our Israeli allies bombed all those refineries in Tehran, leading to death and suffering that I don’t think we’ll ever be able to calculate properly.

It is despicable  that we’re engaged in a war which can’t possibly hold up to the criteria for just war theory. This war is a pre-emptive war with no immediate grave reason, which is always immoral. There is no reasonable expectation that the benefits of the war will outweigh the horrors being committed. This can never be normalized, even though it feels normal.

But I am afraid that the war will be allowed to go on and on, because the United States has forgotten empathy.

Please don’t forget that, all the while this war is raging in the Middle East, all the terrible crimes being committed in America haven’t stopped. Because of the immensely bad publicity, ICE isn’t being so ostentatious right now, but they’re still terrorizing any American who doesn’t look white enough, in Minnesota and around the country. The government is fighting tooth and nail to install those detention facilities, concentration camps by another name, and people are already dying in the facilities. They are rotting away from medical neglect. The death rates keep going up.

These people are not less than you are.

A little girl going to school in the Middle East isn’t less than your own daughter, or your son, or you.

A person breathing in burning oil in Tehran isn’t less worthy of clean air than you are.

An immigrant is a human being, with all the God-given rights you possess. An illegal immigrant or an immigrant who’s committed a crime is as worthy of due process as you are.

If you can’t see that that’s true, I can’t convince you.

If you do see it, fight to make all this evil stop. History will judge you, and so will God.