-Pope St. John Paul II
…yet how indifferent have we become. The utter tragedy of Gazan families has slipped from prominence in the headlines, after leading for but a day or two. My Google newsfeed has a vast assortment of entertainment-related stories and tidbits of celebrity gossip on offer (I watch no video content at all; I barely know who these people are), ushering painful reality out of sight and mind in preference to the ignorance-fueled solace of divertissement. And also: a local report on three food-deprived large dogs; the rightful condemnation was swift and overwhelming, but talk about cognitive dissonance.
In a world which has never been so technologically interconnected, our shortened attention spans have adapted to a daily culture of dismissal, channel-surfing away hard images as if the subjects they depict were notional fictions of the infobahn. When terrible famine gripped East Africa in the 1980’s, virtually every megastar in the pop firmament showed up; Britain’s Band Aid and USA for Africa put out collaborative charity releases. And the public showed up, purchasing the overwrought, overproduced, mediocre singles in record-shattering numbers. This is no criticism of the effort; a mash-up of so many genres, sub-genres, and personalities was virtually certain to turn out pretty much as it did… which does not matter. It was the right thing to do. Or, to put it another way: this was never about artistry or career, but about raising funds and awareness.[1]
Likewise, post 9/11, the whole country rallied around devastated New Yorkers (your present author included among them; yo). As it happens, my own high school was blocks away from the Towers, and I spent some days as caregiver for a friend caught in the dust cloud. After Sandy Hook, a veritable blizzard of paper snowflakes from all over the country and abroad descended upon Newtown… and again, I was working on a farm in Sandy Hook, right through the previous autumn. In both of these cases, I could see firsthand how troubled communities were buoyed by these gestures of support. In contrast, the plight of Gaza has been politicized and therefore dispensed with. Where blame and accusation have been accorded, where one’s fate putatively traces to his own guilt or recklessness, where the present distress has failed to drive the supposed iniquity from his heart, then the impulse toward compassion is superfluous, is it not? We, all of us, grant ourselves permission to turn away… except that whatever you do for one of these least brothers of mine, you do for me. History testifies to what happens when, faced with persecuted innocence and not eager to sort out the fine points, one is content to carry out political expediency and simply wash his hands of the matter.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian American, published a piece on The Atlantic entitled “Hamas Wants Gaza to Starve.”[2] Far-right Kahanist actors in the Israeli government share the same objective themselves, while the Israeli Prime Minister has declared that there is no starvation at all. I have seen the case made that because the New York Times featured a picture of an emaciated juvenile cerebral palsy patient, one whose condition mandates a special medical diet, we have all been deceived. The President of the United States posted this on Truth Social: “The fastest way to end the Humanitarian Crises in Gaza is for Hamas to SURRENDER AND RELEASE THE HOSTAGES!!!” Yes, the Accuser and his associates are in roaring business these days, and hostages have been brutally claimed on all sides, often as pawns of layered, conflicting agendas. St. John Climacus observed that “even animals bewail one of their own.” Is anyone even willing to rise to do as much?
Would that it were all reducible to the toxic web of politics cited above, But no: the aggressor is not this or that enemy faction; it is, ultimately, the indifference of the human heart – mine too no less than yours, alas. The Document on Human Fraternity issued by our late Holy Father Francis in cooperation with Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb states: “In the face of such crises that result in the deaths of millions of children – emaciated from poverty and hunger – there is an unacceptable silence on the international level.” So far not millions of children, but more than enough, all the same.
I was formed by the Church to esteem innocent life as sacrosanct. Why must I see an undernourished (scarcely) nursing Palestinian mother of three (barely) viable young children left to unravel the impossible Hobson’s choice between nourishing her perishing infant or the pre-born she is gestating? Why? She is shown mixing cornstarch and salt into water for the bottle of her dairy-allergic baby. Part of me wonders if dying when he did was a mercy to Pope Francis, because watching this crisis unfold in these proportions while limited in stamina and interventional capacity would have been too much to bear.
There are words we are loath to use, except with the gravest caution. I understand this and approve its prudence. It does well to read this article; as in the case with Alkhatib, what does it mean when persons of good faith are publicly accusing men of their own nations? I find myself willing to jump off the cliff of conventional discourse and suggest, guardedly, that the dynamic of creation’s brokenness is genocidal in its rawest impulse; scarcity, disaster, disease, trauma, and all of their myriad ghoulish cousins fall most heavily upon the weak. We cannot credibly claim to hold for the equal dignity of all human persons if we fail to cherish a preferential option for the poor: natural selection and the law of the jungle pressure and disfavor the vulnerable, such that failure to compensate is tantamount to wholesale disposal. Indeed, the baby with cerebral palsy cannot be provided with his special diet in the conditions of war rationing, and so he languishes. It is he who should have been the most carefully provisioned!
I used to believe that the helpless desolation of victims would evoke mercy – that at some point, some pitch of suffering, the truth of pain and vulnerability would prove to an aggressor that there was no countervailing force against him. I was wrong. The appetite for hate is implacable, and its enactment fuels its rage, the unquenchable fire and the worm that does not die. Malice is never satisfied; it finds validation in pouring itself out precisely on the weak, on the innocent… on the good. In fact, malice trains on the helpless; what better way to harden whatever may be left of your natural heart than by being pitiless to the pitiable? Abandonment is the most complete realization of this malice, because in it lies the greatest cruelty. This is a people – the company of the poor and the helpless – that has been abandoned. Heaven forever cradles the slain 9-month-old Israeli Kfir Bibas and the starved 5-month-old Palestinian Zainab Abu Halib with infinite love, with no distinction or predilection between them. For the flames of its tenderness, too, never say “it is enough.”[3]
There is no end of painful history and geopolitical machinations and military strategies (and, quite frankly, of bad blood), but what is any of it to pre-rational persons who have been alive no more than a few months or a few years, who have known nothing but a world of apocalyptic cataclysm? And how long can they, of either side, continue to be held hostage – not for lack of will on the part of their captors, but because of the diminishing bargaining power they can even offer in a world unwilling to hold them as precious?
As wisdom would have it, whoever would abide putting the sword to the baby or, as it happens, to the land or to its inhabitants, simply cannot be the mother. One who truly loves is willing to relinquish even the very bond itself for the sake of the beloved, when sorely pressed. In contrast, the will to destruction refutes any claim of purity of intent; no cause is sufficiently righteous that the innocent may be sacrificed in its name. The Messianic mission is to bring good news to the afflicted, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, release to the prisoners. We do well to ally ourselves with it, and by it is the Spirit of God made manifest. Were we to live this call in seriousness, then would grief, sorrow and oppression, poverty and hunger and disease, resume their rightful designation as the enemies of a humanity united as one against them, rather than as the indispensable leverage – goods, when assessed according to their utility – of factional interests, pursued across a landscape of Umwertung aller Werte at the most depth level.
So what am I really suggesting? I don’t entirely know myself. For one thing, the anamnestic power of holding the oppressed innocent in our hearts, not dispositionally turning away, nor identifying them with the causes of aggressors because to do so would relieve us of our personal discomfiture at their misfortune, at our own impotence… and at our riches. For another, to weep with those who weep. They’re pathetic little tokens of solidarity, but I’m eating more of the less appetizing though perfectly safe things at which I would otherwise turn up my nose – soft blueberries, melon a bit too close to the rind, and the like. A toddler suffering deathly starvation who has known only scraps values things a little differently than I do. I cannot make the statement, even if only privately to myself, that I am of a higher caste than others and somehow deserving of none but the best of everything. I’m finding myself slightly more averse to pursuing wholesome little pleasures (trips out for ice cream or the Bronx Zoo or driving through the Litchfield hills) as if they were a given, apart from any real reason to celebrate. I don’t know, perhaps nothing can separate us from the love of Christ and his anawim; the hunger and nakedness and persecution need not even be our own, and yet we make so many excuses.
Having begun with a citation from St. John Paul II, I return to his words in closing:
The little brothers and sisters of ours who suffer from hunger, war and illness make an anguished appeal to the world. May their mute cry not go unanswered!
[1] I suppose I cannot be faulted for having some reservations about Michael Jackson’s lyric from We are the World: “As God has shown us, by turning stones to bread” – you’d have to know I’d be all over this one.
[2] The will to destruction is boundless; Hamas and Islamic Jihad released videos today showing starving and emaciated hostages, apparently unconcerned about whether this could evoke sympathy (or provoke rage in Israel).
[3] This image derives from the writings of St. Alphonsus Liguori, whose Memorial it was as I was writing this piece.
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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