How about ALL LIVES MATTER?
In her book, GROUNDED: Finding God in the World, a Spiritual Revolution, Diana Butler Bass describes a clear but painful experience of tribal thinking during a worship service inside a church. She had to walk out of that church because she couldn’t believe that any person, let alone a preacher, could think so tribally and narrowly.
She was attending a service at St. Paul’s church in Alexandria, Virginia on the tenth anniversary of September 11th terrorist attack.
The preacher talked about his feelings of that day and then mentioned his sorrow about the four thousand people who had been killed in the decade after the attack.
The number, four thousand killed, caught the author’s attention. By the end of the decade tens of thousands, if not more, people had died in a war that followed because of 9/11. Most of those people were civilians, Afghans, and Iraqis, in countries America had invaded. She writes:
“Then I realized that four thousand represented the number of American soldiers who had been killed. He was counting only his tribe. What about the other people, those invisible to us but loved by their own families and friends? I could only conclude they did not matter. I gasped audibly. If the church cannot mourn the deaths of all people, Christians and Muslims and Jews, friends and enemies, fellow citizens, and strangers, the guilty and the innocent, what good is religion? Had we learned nothing about being human in the last ten years? Hoping not to make a scene, I slipped out of the pew and left the building. I sat down on the stairs outside, trying to let my sorrow and fury subside.”
I had similar feelings of sadness and outrage when I listened to the announcement of the end of war in Afghanistan on August 30th, 2021. General Kenneth McKenzie, Commander of U.S. Central Command said that the longest American war had a high cost in terms of American soldiers lost and wounded.
He mentioned that 2,461 soldiers had died and more than 21,000 wounded.
There was no mention of the loss of thousands of other lives in the twenty-year long war.
For example, 69,000 Afghan soldiers, 3800 private security contractors, 1144 NATO soldiers, 444 aide- workers, 72 journalists…AND…more than 47,000 Afghan civilians were killed, not to mention the 2.7 million people who fled the country and the 4 million displaced.
None of these humans are part of the cost of the war for the American commander because in his mind, only American lives matter, and that is tribal thinking at its worst.
