There is a common cry of despair in the people of Gaza that sounds so much like West Virginia coal miners and residents of Peoplestown in Atlanta, Georgia. A cry of hopelessness and existential angst we show little willingness to assuage.
The global response to the Gaza protests and Israeli gunfire last week has brought many things to mind. Weird things connected by gossamer threads.
One of those threads brought me to remember a visit with a colleague doing ministry in Peoplestown, a neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia. She told me a story.
It began with a friend and member of Emmaus House. He was a good man, working and helping this redemptive community in a struggling neighborhood. The sort of person who tries and works hard regardless of the situation.
It was a regular day, of course, when he came home from work to find his TV missing. Nothing else was gone, just the TV. He was angry, upset, but not entirely surprised. He’s practical. So he went looking for it.
It didn’t take long to find it. It was in his buddy’s living room. He knew it was his because he had tagged the back of it with orange spray paint.
So he asked his buddy
“Why is my TV in your living room?”
And what he got in response was
“It’s not yours. It’s mine. I found it.”
My friend broke into her own story at this point to tell me that she had been serving this community for five years and was only just coming to understand what was happening in this story.
1) There is no way to get the TV back.
He can’t call the cops, they don’t come to Peoplestown. They won’t file a report. He can’t sue his friend. If he wants the TV back, the only way to get it back is to convince his buddy to give it back or do the very thing his buddy did: break in and steal it.
2) Everything is stolen.
Nothing is permanent. Possessions, even people are stolen and never returned. Ever.
So there’s no trusting the police because the police don’t bring order to this community; it only ever steals young men from the community. TVs are stolen, couches are repossessed, tenets are evicted and homes are repossessed.
Everything and everyone is stolen. Or else runs away. They flee and never come back.
Even this loss feels like a social theft.
She paused as we approached the restaurant. And I realized that was the end of the story. Her friend was never getting his TV back. His buddy wasn’t going to be punished. Those are the social values she and I were imposing on his story. But they weren’t part of his story.
His story isn’t ours, but it could inform it. We were learning something completely new to us.
Living or Dying: the same
Reporting from both sides of the fence in their April 29, 2018 piece, Iyad Abuheweila and David M. Halbfinger, explore a familiar vision of hopelessness. The article, entitled “For Gaza Protester, Living or Dying Is the ‘Same Thing’” follows several days in the life of Saber al-Gerim as he prepares for protests, supports his friends, and tries to make use of a life which no doubt feels useless.
“More than a decade of deprivation and desperation, with little hope of relief, has led thousands of young Gazans to throw themselves into a protest that few, if any, think can actually achieve its stated goal: a return to the homes in what is now Israel that their forebears left behind in 1948.”
For Gerim, hope for the future is strained.
“With its 64 percent unemployment rate among the young, Gaza, under a blockade maintained by Israel and Egypt for years, presents countless men like Mr. Gerim with the grimmest of options.
“They can seek an education in preparation for lives and careers that now seem out of reach, and hope for a chance to eventually emigrate. They can join groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad, devoting themselves to armed conflict with Israel in return for a livelihood and a sense of purpose and belonging. Or they can stay home, staving off boredom by smoking shisha, a tobacco-molasses mix, or stronger stuff, and wait for things to change.”
The familiarity of this paucity of choices struck me.
- There is no economic future which doesn’t involve leaving their home.
- The constant battles over property and community are waged from a place of dislocation and impermanence.
- And they have virtually no trust in authorities to fix the problem.
This recipe could be found in very different places. Gaza, Atlanta, Appalachia and the Midwest, to name a few.
A Despair Rebellion
There is a common cry of despair in the people of Gaza that sounds so much like the political rebellion of Appalachian coal miners, midwest factory workers, and broken teamsters as much as the residents of Peoplestown. A cry of hopelessness and existential angst many of us neither understand nor show much willingness to assuage.
This is the all too familiar territory of the disgruntled white worker.
Suffering five decades of work migration from one community to another in a race to the bottom for wage depression and tax liability, decreasing economic standing and labor influence, and the universal decline of nearly every community not near a metropolitan area is destroying the dignity of our brothers and sisters.
From the indignity of calling a quarter of the country “the rust belt” to the disillusioned sense that our leaders will protect us just as well as the state protected the children of Flint, Michigan, the depressing sense of hopelessness is pervasive.
Think about how strange it is that people all over the world would share this sense in common! Millions of us all crying out in despair with the identical belief that nothing at all could be done! Shouldn’t this common cry of despair inspire us toward unity?
How is it we feel helpless and hopeless now?
Preaching to the World
In the weeks before, it seemed like Harry and Meghan’s royal wedding would be like any other. Then they invited the Most Rev’d Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church to preach. And Episcopalians knew what was coming even if much of the world didn’t.
There’s power in love!
Bishop Curry preached a message of hope to a world incredibly divided. We Episcopalians knew our Presiding Bishop would preach about love—that’s his calling card, and this was a wedding!—but he went further than that. He preached hope.
Against a backdrop which strains our hope—geopolitical tensions and nuclear standoffs, domestic unrest and violence, even the British treatment of the homeless in preparation of the wedding—Bishop Curry proclaimed the Good News of God’s love and redeeming hope.
He preached to a gathering full of some of the most powerful people in the world, to the Queen of England herself and didn’t shy from our checkered histories. But he embodied the moment, the Pentecost, and the reconciling power of God’s love.
He was there by invitation, a stunning move toward rebuilding community in the midst of division. He came as the head of a rebellious Episcopal Church, an African American, a descendant of slaves, a lover of Jesus, a believer in hope and redemption, and evangelical proclaimer of the Good News.
Standing in front of so many whose wealth was built on the backs of slaves, who have never grappled with their inheritance or been put in a position to hear their own complicity, Curry’s flesh, his voice, his very movement laid bare their relationship to the hopeless.
But Bishop Curry didn’t shame them.
He invited them to join him.
He’s already on the journey. He lives his life, as Dr. Robert Puff calls “steeped in hope”. So there’s no time for this hopelessness junk. God’s redeeming love is way more than this territorial marking, excuses and smug judgment the powerful use to demean the powerless.
We’ve got a world to change. Hope to bring. Love to give.
The one who should be hopeless offered hope to the powerful as we cry in despair over guns, money, and culture. He preached to us, reminding us that no matter how bad things may look, we’re responsible for our future. Because we’ve got the power of love. And with it, we really can change the world.