Some months ago I saw an image on social media
that has haunted me ever since. It wasn’t gory nor bloody, though plenty of images
nowadays are. There were no broken buildings and billowing smoke clouds, no
dead bodies. Just a little orphaned one-year old girl, naked except for a very
full nappy, which had been on her so long that there was encrustation of
leakage at the tops of her legs and sores had begun to develop. She had no-one
to care for her, no-one to take off the days-old nappy. I wept at my computer.
How I’d wanted to scoop her up, take off that
soiled nappy, bathe her in soft scented bubbles, play and splash the water,
hear her giggle and squeal, dry her in fluffy towels and pat her silky skin
with sweetly scented talc. How lovely she’d look in a simple but clean little
white baby grow. Her hair would curl into looping black ringlets as it dried,
hanging down into her huge brown eyes.
But I’m frozen by inaction. How can I help that
little girl or even ones like her? Can I donate money? What might it end up
buying? Who can be trusted? Short of going to Syria – which is simply insane –
what can I do?
Guilt and frustration add to my imagination
resulting in a frozen trinity of despair.
Yet I still have my safety, warm shelter, food…
and in an hour or so this despair will lift as my own day-to-day living pulls
me out of my imagination, away from the images online, and the news coverage.
I’ll blink and like waking from a bad dream, I’ll see my own world, I’ll feel a
flush of gratitude. But gratitude is no longer enough…
I struggled as a child with a few things in the
Bible. I struggle as an adult with many more aspects of religion, but some of
that bible stuff I’ve come to realize, makes sense to me now.
It boiled down to the whole, “turn the other cheek” philosophy. Young and immature, I couldn’t understand why Jesus said to do that. But age can grant us startling insights, and I’ve come to understand it a little, if not fully.
But it goes a bit like this:
People do not kill each other. Ethnicity does not
terrorize or maim other people.
BAD people terrorize other people.
BAD people frighten other people.
BAD people hurt other people.
BAD people kill other people.
BAD people do bad things.
NOT Muslim or Christian or whites or blacks.
No matter what reason a person cites for their
actions, no matter how justified they think they are, frightening another
person is an act of terror.
When someone decides (most likely without any
factual evidence) that another has come into their country, stolen their jobs
and soaked up the resources, that is merely that person’s opinion. The
statistics, should you chose to investigate, might prove you wrong and at the
very least provide you with an informed debate.
As soon as a person tells someone to “go back” to where
they came from that person is doing the wrong thing. A bad thing – and this is a fact.
At the very least it causes another person to be frightened. When a person instills such terror, that person is a terrorist.
As soon as we daub paint on a wall to write hate-speech, we become bad people because we are doing a bad thing – we are terrorizing
another human being.
The moment you willfully physically or emotionally
hurt another person, you are a bad person.
FACT – bad people do bad things to other people.
Despite all the diversity in the human race there
are really only two types of people. Good people and good people who have given
into doing bad things to other people.
That little orphaned toddler with the soiled nappy
was there because of bad people, not Muslims, or white privilege or politicians
– just bad people.
Let’s keep it simple. Don’t be a bad person and
strive to love your fellow human beings. If you have food and clothes and a
safe place to live you’ve made it in life and you are lucky. God didn’t give
this to you anymore than he took it away from that little toddler. What made
you so special and her not special enough? The God I believe in doesn’t have favorites.
Jesus loved the sinners too, thankfully, and therein lies our redemption. (For
the atheists reading this – please don’t stop reading because I used the G-word
and the named the J-person!) I hope everyone can see that not all bad people
are bad all of the time. Everyone has the capacity to stop doing bad things.
We do need to wage a war on terror, but by waging
a war on people doing bad things. And we win this war with love.
In the same way that the undercurrent of racism,
sectarianism and bullying rippling below the surface is now taking hold, fueling bad people, perhaps we can harness the love that exists in each of us
to turn those people around. This may sound ridiculously simple, ludicrously naive but hey - it worked for Gandi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King and that's good enough for me.
Turning the other cheek is not about letting bad
people get away with being bad. It’s about us not becoming bad too. It’s about
us keeping our standards high. So think about this with every social media post
you share. Are you ridiculing someone – even if you feel that person deserves
it? Posting a fact is one thing, so long that it is a fact. Posting opinion is
fine too if you’ve considered it – is it fair, does it promote hatred or love? Choose love - everyday, not just on Valentines Day.
Byddi Lee
