New Eyes

I went in with eyes that were absorbing traffic and congestion of a busy city that makes traffic on the 91 seem like a vacation. I came out with eyes that could better appreciate that what I see is a long way from where they came. 36 years ago millions were flooding into India as refugees because of the mass genocide being wrought by Pakistani forces in a battle over the independence of Bangladesh as a nation. 36 years ago our friend’s mother lost two brothers in that war. 36 years ago journalists took pictures of walking skeletons somehow surviving a famine. 36 years ago the main leaders, educators, doctors, and intellectuals of the newly independent Bangladesh were murdered as Pakistan grudgingly lost the war and granted independence, betting on the instability that would be caused by killing their most educated citizens. I went in thinking that the environment would be a hard one to live in. I came out admiring that it is lived in today at all.

The source of my day’s education was the Liberation War Museum … a bit of a pre-taste, we suspect, for the museum awaiting us in Vietnam telling of our own country’s losses.

It is absolutely beyond reason what humanity can do to one another. I recently heard a comment that we cringe at animals who eat their young, but that pales in comparison to the atrocities humans perpetrate on humans. And the thing about taking in that kind of information is that it doesn’t seem possible that it could happen more than once. But it has and it does. Over and over and over again. And who is sought for the answers? Other broken humans – when a country’s in trouble, it calls to other “stronger” countries to step in. There’s a whole political balance that I won’t even try to analyze right now about when and where and how to intervene in world atrocities, but it strikes me as a paradox that we turn to another version of the very thing that’s attacking us. It’s kind of like turning to a tiger because a lion is chasing you – he seems kinder until he, too, is hungry enough to eat you.

I know the world wants to think that we as human beings have the answers and solutions to bring world peace, but we don’t. Days past and present prove that. When I asked our guide whether she held any particular faith, she said she believed in “humanity”. As we are looking at pictures of violence upon humanity by humanity, she nonetheless can look me full in the face and say she believes in it. The original lie in the Garden is the same one being told today – a desperate clinging to the hope that we think we can be “as God”.

There is one true God. He has left two commandments: Love Him, and love one another. Everywhere we hear people encouraging the second while ignoring the first. But the one can not be done without the other. If we do not seek the author and creator of love with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, what hope have we for love of one another?