OF PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD-WILL TO MEN

On December 10th, the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize was most-deservedly awarded to Mulala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was targeted and shot in the neck and forehead by the Taliban for standing up for education.  She has made a remarkable recovery and has got right back up for education rights for all.  If anything, she has only got stronger, as it goes when what happens doesn’t kill you.  

Many believed she actually deserved the honor last year when, on her 16th birthday and the first Mulala Day, a day to celebrate the power of education, she gave her speech to the Youth Assembly at the UN and spoke of peace, opportunity and education.  She went so far as to say, “I do not even hate the Talib who shot me.  Even if there is a gun in my hand and he stands in front of me. I would not shoot him. This is the compassion that I have learnt from Muhammad-the prophet of mercy, Jesus christ and Lord Buddha. This is the legacy of change that I have inherited from Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. This is the philosophy of non-violence that I have learnt from Gandhi Jee, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa. And this is the forgiveness that I have learnt from my mother and father. This is what my soul is telling me, be peaceful and love everyone.”

And we can’t even stand someone saying “Merry Christmas” to us.

I won’t go as far as to say there’s a War on Christmas.  Not with every storefront and advertisement showcasing the holiday, but it’s disconcerting that the stand has been made at saying “Merry Christmas,” stopping the festivities of the holiday short at the point of an actual human interaction and connection, which is what Christmas is really all about.  And in the holiday season, that meaning is singular to Christmas.  

While the other holidays of the season are joyful celebrations, they’re not inherent celebrations of joy itself.  Kwanzaa is a celebration of the African heritage and culture.  Hannukah, a commemoration of a people’s victory over oppression and a miracle that told them they weren’t alone in their darkest days.  But Christmas is a celebration of the man who lived for peace and love for mankind.  It’s about joy and goodwill for all.  Are we so cynical, so angry that we can’t hear that message unless it’s delivered in the exact way we want to hear it?  Do we have to get so disgusted that someone would wish us well while daring to invoke God in the process?  Is this an appropriate response to well-wishes: “How dare they try to put their religion on me.  If they knew me, they wouldn’t be wishing me a Merry Christmas.”  Because maybe that’s the point.  If they knew us, maybe they wouldn’t want to wish merriment upon us.

All year, everyday, complete strangers pass through our lives.  We sit next to them on the train.  We let them pass in a tight hallway.  We hold a door.  We just make simple accidental eye contact on the street.  But how often do we wish someone joy or goodwill, or anything?  How often do we want to?  We don’t know these people.  What if she leaves her phone on during movies and ruins the show for everyone?  What if he drives along the shoulder to bypass traffic and then cuts off everyone who respectfully waited?  What if she smokes right by the entrance and blows smoke in everyone’s face before throwing her finished butt on the ground, making her garbage someone else’s problem?  What if he hits his kids?  What if they’re just bad at heart and will return any overture of goodwill and humanity with animosity and disgust? Simply, what if they don't deserve it?

I wish it were easier to be more forgiving.  To overlook cracks in morality.  To be able to say to a Talib who shoots up a school, “I know it’s not your fault.  I know you just do what you do because you’ve been kept in the dark in order to be manipulated and used as a pawn to carry out evil.”  But that’s not the world we live in.  The existence of that evil poses a very real physical and symbolic threat to the way of life we want to lead.  Allowing that evil to exist inspires more evil that combats the good forgiving it inspires.  It undermines the best of us.  And so we have to be vigilant.  While aspiring to reach the example set by Nobel Laureates, we still have to keep our guard up.  And it’s exhausting.  

No one wants to fight the good fight.  They fight because they have to.  But it gets hard to keep getting back up when you’re knocked down so often.  So can’t we just give ourselves a break, even if only for a short time?  Can’t we just be allowed to assume the best of everyone and have our temporary, unconditional love for mankind rewarded with a smile?  A “Thank you?” The warm feeling that we can actually get to that good place, instead of getting a sneer and a lump of coal in our stomach that tells us humanity is doomed?  Can’t we even just pretend for a little while that we’re already there?  That there’s hope for humanity and the battle isn’t fruitless?  

So with that in mind: to the Jewish people, I wish you a Happy Hannukah.  To the Africans of the world, a Happy Kwanzaa.  And to everyone, a Merry Christmas…  And a Happy Mulalamas.

Second Star to the Right

Last Thursday night, NBC aired a live production of Peter Pan.  Eight hours later, NASA launched the Orion spacecraft.  The precursor to the first manned flight to Mars, getting us closer to that second star to the right than ever before.  That can’t be a coincidence.

The Orion constellation gets its name from the legendary Greek hunter and demigod son of Poseidon, but the constellation has been a focus of religions around the the world since we first looked up and pondered the depths of our mind and space.  Pyramids in the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan (Place of the Gods) and the Giza Pyramids in Egypt were erected to align with the stars known as Orion’s Belt, and the constellation is also referenced multiple times in the Judeo-Christian Bible with the Hebrew word “Kesil,” which means “fool.”  That comes from the root “Kesel” (which is, also likely not coincidentally, the root for the Hebrew month of Kislev, which we are now in), meaning “hope.”

Fool and hope...  I like those.  It must take a little of both to pull off something amazing like landing a man on Mars.  Just look at what it took to get a man on the Moon.

From the time the first person dreamed of stepping foot on the Moon, to the first flight by the Wright brothers in 1903, to the formation of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1915, which paved the way for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to open shop in 1958, all the way through the space wars of the late 1950s and 1960s and the ultimate Moon landing, a lot of foolish hope must have been mustered to push on.  There were countless setbacks.  Millions of dollars spent.  Dozens of missions failed.  Four Pioneer space probes destroyed.  Eleven American lives tragically lost during testing and training.  But then, on July 16, 1969, at 9:32 AM, EDT, the rockets of Apollo 11 cleared the tower of the Kennedy Space Center.  

At 9:44, the craft enters into Earth’s orbit.  On July 19th, the Moon’s.  

July 20th, Lance Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin begin their descent to the Moon’s surface aboard the lunar module Eagle.  At 4:18 EDT, the first manned spacecraft touches down on the Moon.  

And on July 21, 1969, at 10:56 EDT, Neil Armstrong, with one small step, takes a giant leap and sets the first footprint down on the surface of the Moon.

We’ve taken a lot of steps since then.  We’ve built an international space station.  We landed on Mars.  On a comet.  We have spacecrafts charting the farthest reaches of the universe and giving us glimpses of planets that have never even been seen by the naked eye.  We have gone further than those first stargazers could have ever thought possible.  But in a lot of other ways, we haven’t gone anywhere at all.  

As it was in the 1960s, during the race for space, we find ourselves in a tense stand-off with Russia, which has started gobbling back up land that hasn’t been under its control since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  The threat of nuclear war has only multiplied and continues to grow with every spin of a centrifuge in Iran.  The Middle East is still fractured and threatening to explode.  We still find ourselves mired in a war on a foreign land which we can’t escape from.  Race relations in America are returning to a boiling pitch and Washington’s streets are once again feeling the pounding of angry and disillusioned marchers.  And in some ways, things have gotten even worse.  Islamist extremism and climate change pose real or imagined threats to our world on an existential level.  At times, it gets difficult to believe things will ever get better.

But we can’t give up.  We need to hold onto the foolish hope that we can change things.  That we can make them better.  Even when all rational thought and evidence is pointing us to the contrary, we have to believe it can get better.  Because sometimes, just believing in something strongly enough is all you need to give it life.

A HOUSE DIVIDED

In the name of Michael Brown, in the name of Eric Garner and in the name of racial equality, protesters the world over have taken to the streets.  In New York, protesters cornered the busiest island in the country, shutting down highways in Manhattan from east to west and bridges from north to south, and along the way, they also shut down Lincoln Tunnel, named for the man who ended the Civil War and slavery in our country.  That symbolism may not seem like much, and it may have been lost on most of the protesters, but when you have the attention of the whole world, every little thing matters.  In fact, even when no one seems to be paying attention, everything matters. Or else nothing matters.

That is one of the most unfortunate sentiments to come out of all this.  There is a whole swath of people who feel less than because they are, sometimes literally, put under the foot of the police for no reason other than being of a certain color.  And to exacerbate the matter, they then see that behavior ignored.  No one should feel like they don’t matter.  It’s a serious issue.  The problem now is, the black and minority communities have chosen to use the case in Ferguson as their rallying cry.  A case where the black man was in the wrong and brought the unfortunate run-in with the police on himself.  Did he bring the fateful gunshots on himself?  That will likely be an issue disputed to the ends of time, but there is no question that he robbed a store and invited the police to come for him, making the encounter justified.  And when that is the poster case for the movement, it makes it easier to, from afar, disregard the very real and earned cries as unfounded.

On the other side, the black and minority communities claim there is a systemic problem within the police force.  But if that were true, how could any self-respecting black person or minority join the force?  And they do.  As of 2010, more than half of the NYPD was made up of minorities.  The truth is, police officers are under a lot of stress, especially in minority communities.  Why is there more crime in minority communities?  An important question.  One that matters in the larger scale of things, but does not pertain to this conversation.  It is not for the police to ponder why it is, but to handle the situation as it is.  Our police aren’t there to consider socio-economic issues but to simply protect and serve.  And having to protect a neighborhood when in the back of your mind is the thought that the neighborhood whose protection has been entrusted to you can also be the source of your demise can not only make one jumpy in the name of self-preservation, it could also embitter a person.  Having to say goodbye to your loved ones every morning because of the very real possibility that it could be the last time you do could change a person.  Does that give them the right to harass and harm innocent men, women and children?  Absolutely not.  In fact, all that does is take a little innocence from the world, darkening their streets a little more, only creating more shadows to jump at.

Ultimately, both sides are justifiably upset and in a way both at fault.  Now the grievances have been aired, the lines have been drawn and the stage is set.  So where do we go from here?  We come together.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  President Lincoln said that, and it has never been questioned or doubted.  Our house is divided.  Now how do we close the gap? We learn to accept that there aren’t two sides in this struggle.  When one side hurts the other, it only hurts us all.  The relentless cycle of hate, violence and distrust pulls us all into a cyclone of pain.  Once we force ourselves to see things from the other’s perspective, hopefully we can then understand each other and learn something.  We can see that behind the shield there is a human being and the last thing they want is to encounter trouble.  We can understand that beneath every color of skin there is just flesh and blood; when it’s kicked it bruises, when it’s pricked and shot it bleeds, and when its spirit is beaten down they sink into the darkness that breeds the enemy no one wants them to be. And the people on both sides that can hear that and absorb it are not the problem.  The ones who do not are.  And that’s the other half of this story.

The house is divided, and on both sides of the divide there is a seedy basement.  There are bad men and women on both sides of this who don’t care about the rest of us, and this idea of “protecting our own” is tearing down our house from its foundation.  That’s why it’s so important for those on the up-and-up to come together and root out these bottom-dwellers.  The guilty among us who don’t care that their selfish acts bring undue suspicion on the innocent around them, and the ones who aren’t in danger of becoming embittered but start off that way and don’t care who they’re kicking as long as they can kick someone down with an expected power of impunity, and who turn badges into targets; that is where the problem lies.  That is who we have to unite against.  Not as a community or as a culture, not as a squad or a force, but as a race of human beings.  We all need to be able to come together, police and the community they protect and serve, and shine a light on the ones who aren’t looking out for anyone other than themselves and rid ourselves of that stain so the best and finest of us can then come out into the light of a new day.

But I’m getting ahead of us.  That’s the long road.  First, we just need to take a first step.  For now, instead of just walking or marching by each other with veiled or open disdain, how about we do something positive.  We can start small.  Shake a hand.  Make a connection. Instead of shutting a bridge down, build one.  A handshake might not seem like much, like it can’t accomplish much, but it matters.  Everything does.