Avoiding Rebirth?

The 2000 film CHOCOLATE starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp features a final Easter sermon by the fresh-faced Pere Henri. After many trials and conflicts born of a traditional standard of piety based on what people deny themselves and who they exclude, he reminds the congregation “We’ve got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create…and who we include…”—by today’s voiced American values, an abhorrent concept. A nonwhite legal immigrant was recently “accidentally” condemned to life in a Salvadoran prison without redress for being an American terrorist when he had committed no acts of terrorism in 14 years as an American husband and father. As comedian Ronny Chieng noted, the man has to be a very bad terrorist to be so slow.

As we’ve seen in FINDING YOUR ROOTS, a PBS exploration of ancestry, specifically DNA in our ancestors, perception changes when we take time to empathize with those who have lived before us and how they contributed to who we are today. What if, in accordance with the rebirth theme of the Easter/spring season, each of us had to choose a different race to inhabit at least temporarily? Which would you choose and why? What if you had to choose a different religion or gender? What do you think you’d learn, if anything? One of my classes once required students to spend 24 hours inhabiting a disability—moving in a wheelchair, hobbling with crutches, living in dire poverty. The point of these exercises was to give us a chance to glimpse what people who allow themselves to be empathetic understand. What do they see when they look deep into the eyes of the other? Can profit or ego blind us enough so we’ll never see?

I once had a professor who was adamant that humans are different in kind from animals—as opposed to being different in degree. In other words, we’re made of different stuff—so different that we’re free to use animals in any way we choose. But have you ever looked deep into the eyes of a gorilla, for example, or even a cow waiting to be slaughtered? I have, and it soured me on visiting the old time zoos where sorrowful animals were imprisoned in horrific cages. Stockyards make me feel physically ill. Have you looked deep into the eyes of people you wish to hold distant from yourself? Can you grip your belief that you’re superior tightly enough to prevent yourself from realizing what it means to kill both the earth and the creatures that evolved to sustain it? There was a reason so many Nazi concentration camp guards became alcoholics or committed suicide. They weren’t over-educated or elite. They were human.

The government can order people to stop thinking, considering outside viewpoints, or empathizing, and some few will be able to obey. But most of us have no choice but to feel when we see someone badly mistreated. And once we know something, we can’t un-know it, as much as we might wish we could. We know the security officers who were badly injured doing their jobs defending the Congress deserve more honor. We know those we send into battle have earned appropriate housing, therapy, and pay when they return home. We know that most of the victims of war are innocent bystanders—many being children. We can pretend but the truth will fester in the back of our minds. And one day we may experience that rebirth we mention so casually in church. We’ll become more than we were before. And maybe we’ll behave differently, also. Some accept that therein lies the reason we were placed here in the first place.