Hashtag Blessed
By A.B.B.
“Be thankful you have been blessed to live in the US.” If I had a dollar for every time a Christian Statist has uttered those words to me, the Federal Reserve might have some competition.
Thanks to Jeff Sessions, Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, and “It’s very Biblical to enforce the law,” the on-going meme war between good and evil has been ripe with example after example of horrible crimes against humanity, justified as “It’s very Biblical to enforce the law.”
Naturally, Nazi Germany and the Nuremberg Defense is one of the most prevalent “It’s very Biblical to enforce the law,” wellsprings of meme life. I’ve taken to sharing a few of these on Facebook because they make an excellent and poignant point – a law is not just, simply because it exists. And when the law is unjust, it is our Christian duty and obligation to stand firmly against the law.
Like clock-work, the Christian right is down my throat, “This is not Nazi Germany! You can’t comprehend what Hitler did to Europe! So and so actually lived through the Occupation and you can’t imagine the atrocities they’ve seen!”, as if that’s the point of the meme.
But they make a good point. Yes, I’ll concede that to them: they make an EXCELLENT point: I don’t live in the desolate rubble of fallen cities, broken families, and rivers of blood that warfare makes common.
I’m blessed to live in the US.
But for the 134 countries the US is currently at war with, the citizens of those occupied territories are not so blessed. The people in the seven countries where 26,171 bombs were dropped in 2016 alone are not so blessed.
Their reality is that they do wake up to a fallen city. They do wake up to find their parents, or their children, or their siblings dead. They do wake up to rivers of blood, where the life-fluid of their loved ones flows through the damnation and destruction of their communities.
I could be so misfortunate as to be born into Yemen whose citizens are currently experiencing the worst Cholera outbreak in history, with an expected 1,000,000 cases by the end of this year. Cholera, which affects mostly the young and the elderly, could almost literally be treated with Gatorade! Yet we, the US supporting a Saudi coalition, instead of sending help and relief, chose to bomb a Doctors without Borders facility and ensure countless more deaths from an easily treated disease. Yes, I am blessed to live comfortably in the US, and not in Yemen.
Worse yet, I might have been born in Iraq where the deaths of 500,000 innocent children in a foolish response to a weak dictator was, as UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright said, a cost that was, “worth it.” Truly, I am blessed not to have been one of those Iraqi children murdered in cold-blood at the hands of the US.
Yet we at home sit back in front of our TVs praising this or that soldier for how many kills he or she has; applauding whatever foreign policy doctrine undermines the legitimacy of some small country in the Middle East we probably couldn’t even find on a map; we weep tears of joy when we see homes, cafés, mosques, and cemeteries reduced to piles of rubble. It’s ok. After all, they hate us because we’re rich, right? Definitely not because we leave a trail of death and destruction, all in the name of freedom of course, everywhere we go.
To add insult to injury, the highest and mightiest among us proclaim from their lofty thrones, “Matthew 5:6! Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God.” They are only doing God’s work and trying to bring peace to the world. When does this peace start? How many innocent people have to be murdered before we can be called children of God? How many of our own propped up puppet states have to be bloodily dismantled, and re-propped up before everyone lives in harmony with each other?
Still, to those who are so set in their ways, so nationalistic, so statist, so enamored with their imaginary ideals of American freedom, they think I’m the crazy one who can’t see that world domination is just one Caliphate away, so justifying endless bombing, endless wars, and endless American tax dollars, to the tune of nearly $5 trillion!
Come on guys! Your way of being a “peacemaker” clearly isn’t working. If you’d read just a little farther past the Beatitudes, you’d find Matthew [5:14], “You are the light of the world…” It says BE a light to the world.
Not light the world on fire.
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