Violence and anger in your own back yard gives you a different perspective on world events.
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Just two weeks ago I was having a difficult conversation with a dear friend of mine who is Jewish. She had her opinion on Gaza. I could not wholeheartedly agree with her, nor did I disagree. I know that I don’t know, and I suspect that no one does.
I understand the anger, the distrust, the desire to have your emotional beliefs validated by provable facts.
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I also understood that it was far more personal to her than it was to me, and I respect that. The situation there is complex — layered in custom and conditioning that goes back centuries. Scholars don’t understand all of the aspects, and even those who say they do cannot agree on what is happening, why it is happening, or what we can or should do to keep it from happening.
I understand the anger, the distrust, the desire to have your emotional beliefs validated by provable facts. But it was not mine to defend or to deny, and I could see why those who had so much at stake were angry with those who, from armchairs around the world, professed to have all the answers.
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This anger and fear, and the national attention that has come with it, is a level of betrayal that none of us seem to know how to deal with.
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Today the anger, the distrust, and the desire to have emotional beliefs validated by provable facts is playing out right here at home. In the little city of St. Louis, which seems too small to absorb this into the fabric of confrontations of a smaller nature that happen every day in places like Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York. And it seems especially fragile compared to an area like Gaza, which has for years seen daily horrors that most Americans cannot even imagine as their worst nightmare. This anger and fear, and the national attention that has come with it, is a level of betrayal that none of us seem to know how to deal with.
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But there are parallels. Much like Gaza, there are layers of custom and conditioning that go back centuries. Only two and a half centuries, but that’s long enough to make attitudes difficult to unravel. And much like Gaza, everyone has an opinion, and a need to be proven right. Normally sweet, or at least civil, people resort to name calling or even threats, and if you don’t take one side strongly enough you’re accused of being on the other side.
Comparisons to the Gaza conflict are showing up in news outlets such as Huffington Post’s stories from the Ferguson protests, and this article from St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist, Aisha Sultan.
And we have plenty of reminders that what is happening here is not isolated to our city.
I’m sorry son, it’s not just #Ferguson… It’s America… #Uniteblue pic.twitter.com/tPs9Bu6GZw
— Cynthia @cs4colorado (@cs4colorado) August 17, 2014
… perhaps this is what we needed to jar us into remembering two unavoidable and universal truths.
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Perhaps it takes having the pattern repeat itself here, in a city that is hardly large enough to be called a metropolis, in a city that is in the heart of America, in a city that is so much like every other city and yet, in some ways, so unique in matters of race and religion, perhaps this is what we needed to jar us into remembering two unavoidable and universal truths:
“We all matter.” pic.twitter.com/jRIeA027m4 — Jack (@jack) August 16, 2014
and
“Truth is, we are all one bullet away from being a #Hashtag” #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/wZYYCMhMPu — Chernynkaya (@Chernynkaya) August 17, 2014
Title Photo by St. Louis native, Joshua Nezam. Josh’s work is also featured in A Day in #Ferguson – History Happens Here.