Our Enemy

There was once a man walking down the pier of a coastal town to look out at the ocean the day after a huge storm. The man noticed a young child picking up objects from the beach and hurling them into the ocean with great purpose. The man yelled to the child to ask what she was doing and she yelled back that the storm had washed ashore hundreds and thousands of starfish, that they’d become stranded on the beach, and with the sun getting ever higher in the sky they would surely die if she didn’t throw them back into the ocean. The man did indeed notice the beach was strewn with starfish some of which were perceptibly still moving. The man, still perplexed by the situation, retorted that there was no way she could save them all, indeed many were already long past hope. What difference would it make to all those starfish she wouldn’t be able to save in time. The child paused for just a moment and retorted “to those I do save it makes all the difference in the world,” and she went straight back to throwing the starfish into the ocean. The man considered her point and joined her on the beach, throwing the starfish back into the ocean one at a time, saving as many as they could.

I first heard this story in a sermon when I was a kid. I’m sure it was told a bit differently, and I don’t necessarily remember what the main point of that sermon was, but it’s always struck me as a powerful image that just won’t leave the back of my mind. This story pushed its way to the front of my mind today after I felt depressed from the news of the mass shooting in Orlando. Actually it wasn’t so much the news itself, it was the certainty I felt in my heart that in spite of the lives lost, in spite of the grieving families, in spite of all the words and acts of mourning and compassion that nothing will be done to stop such tragedies from happening again and again and again. After all, if America was complacent enough to not let the deaths of school children be a line in the sand, what hope is there that the deaths of adults in a gay bar would spur any action?

It is that painful sense of futile inevitability, which comes from having seen this show before so many times, mixed with the realization that for the same reasons why the LGBTQIA community was targeted in the first place, there would be no call to save some crowd of queers. To be sure, there were indeed the same voices condemning gays to burn in hell, the same self-satisfied glee that other humans were suffering if only because of the people they loved, yet there was something different this time to give a little hope. For the first time in a few years, at least, I’ve allowed myself to feel just a small glimmer of hope in the wake of such a terrible tragedy, because many voices that had once railed against homosexuals, a surprising number of people who had remained silent before as Americans were shot down began to take their stand because this event broke their hearts too.

Hope. Hope has been a dangerous word for the last few years because it has seemed like every step forward has been met with a significant step backward. On one day we see the Supreme Court rule in favor of marriage equality and on the next day we see states draft legislation to entrench bigotry. We see the economy do better as unemployment goes down and we see the gulf between rich and poor gets wider. As the world grows more peaceful we are inundated with images that remind us that there are still children losing parents, still parents mourning children. And throughout all of this, hope can cut deep inside as it seems like it might be a worthwhile luxury to resign ourselves and stop the disappointment, to stop allowing ourselves to give into a false hope. Yet as Barack Obama defiantly challenged us in his first bid for the White House, “In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”

We have many enemies that challenge the progress of this nation, many enemies who make hope a painful choice, but we too often obstruct ourselves by misidentifying who those enemies are. Right now we’re having a fight over whether we can enact any meaningful and basic gun control to keep firearms out of the hands of dangerous people. This has been repeatedly hampered in the past by groups like the NRA, who fund politicians to fight bills that have wide public support and would make us safer, and would let us live freer in the tempered confidence of that security. But the NRA is not our enemy, the gun owners of America are not our enemy.

The perpetrator of this slaughter has been identified as Muslim, he supposedly did this act in honor of ISIS. We are still embroiled in a bitter fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda and the Taliban and so many other groups who claim to represent Islam. They do not represent the Muslims I know, the Muslims I’ve broken bread with, the Muslims who contribute to this country and make her a great nation. Our enemy is not Islam, our enemy is not Muslims and we do ourselves a disservice, we make the struggle that much harder when we define us and them to exclude the very people most harmed by groups like ISIS. They are not our enemy.

Our enemy is ignorance, our enemy is want, our enemy is fear, our enemy is indifference. Our enemy is the cold, heartless lack of compassion, the willingness to do nothing in the face of injustice. Our enemy is complacence in the face of adversity and the inability to do that most American of things, to hope. We can’t stop every criminal and we can’t stop every crime, but that is not a deterrence from stopping any criminal or any crime. Our military, our police, our defense forces work tirelessly gaining victories we will never hear about because they did stop murderers, they did stop those who would break the nation’s heart. To be American is to see the world as it is with all its flaws, to see the sum total of all our successes and our failures and to not only believe but to know deep within us that we can do better, that we must do better, that we will do better. To be American, and paraphrase an Irish writer, is to dream of things that never were and to ask ‘why not?’

Our national hope is at once our great strength and our great challenge. We have seen how much our nation’s hopes have achieved and so we become complacent in the knowledge that it will all be sorted out some day. None of the great strides this country has made came out of a vacuum; it came from the dedicated work of real people to not accept the status quo and to not accept the promise of tomorrow, but rather to demand that it come today. This was as true when Dr King challenged the complacent in the 60s as it is today. “It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.’” The beautiful words and promises of people who were once willing to fight against the dignity of all human beings is a great beginning, but it is not the end, it cannot be the end. Now is the time that we transform hope into action and action into victory against the real enemies of our nation.

Hope invites pain and there will still be heartbreak in our future. To demand change is to run headlong into a brick wall again and again and again in the hopes of making a tiny chip so that the next person can make a still larger chip in that wall, but it has proven to be the only way we ever earn the things worth fighting for. We will win and we will lose and we will dust ourselves off to try again. And though we can’t win every fight, though we can’t save every life, it’s worth remembering that for all those we do save it makes all the difference in the world. That is why we keep trying, that is why we keep hoping.