The Perennial Question

This evening, I watched an "inspired by true events" movie entitled Lord of War, which stars Nicholas Cage as a gun runner smuggling weapons into war torn countries. On particularly memorable scene in the movie was when Nicholas Cage's brother persuaded him to abort an ongoing arms deal in order to postpone (if not prevent) the massacre of an entire village.

This scene reminded me of a line from The Constant Gardener, where the aid worker played by Rachel Weisz tells her love interest to slow down their vehicle, wanting to drive a woman, her baby, and her brother who are walking 40 kilometers back to his home. The boyfriend protests, "Be reasonable. There are millions of people, they all need help. It's what the agencies are here for," to which she replies, "Yeah, but these are three people that we can help."

This line has stuck in my head ever since I watched the film and ties in quite well with the whole "Acts of Random Kindness" preached in Evan Almighty. [I'm starting to sound like I get my theology from movies...] I guess it really does challenge us to think about what are we doing about the social injustice we see around us. When we open the papers and read about war and genocide, do we care, or do we think of it as some far removed problem in some remote place that we cannot influence. I've said this before, and I regret that I have to keep saying it to remind myself not to be apathetic.

Some pundits would advise us to not look so far, but to turn instead to our immediate community and help those who we can. But is that a cop out answer meant to help us avoid having to think about murder and starvation that happen on a daily basis in parts of the world that we have the luxury to ignore?

One of the passages which will be used for the Sec 2 curriculum at church next quarter is taken from Exodus 2:11-25 and describes Moses' initial attempt at pursuing 'social justice' by murdering an Egyptian who was abusing one of his people. Certainly, that was a rash act and Moses then had to spend the next 40 years in the desert for God to mould him into a man fit to lead the Isrealites out of Egypt. In this regard, it appears that what may be the most obvious thing to do at first may not be the best thing after all. In the book The Anti-Politics Machine, James Ferguson documents how Western attempts to develop Lesotho through the construction of roads ended up making things worse for the people as the government then used the roads to extract more taxes from them. So before we jump onto the next crusade to help our the world's marginalised, we also need to take time to really think about our motivations and whether we even can presume to know what's best for them.

I know this all sounds really disjointed, but thus was the nature of the conversation I had with my brother following the movie for it's not immediately apparent what our next step should be: "prayerful consideration" or "less talk, more action". I doubt this conundrum will be solved easily, but I guess as a first step, we need to be able to extract meaning from whatever it is we are doing, be it at work or at school, for if we labour purely to earn the extra buck, it seems like we labour in vain.

The following is the 1976 version of a poem entitled "First they came..." attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the apathy of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.