Skip to main content

Fear

I was thinking the other day of a scene from the film Battle of Algiers, about the revolution to drive the French out of Algeria; after a cafe has been bombed a group of French civilians find a young Arab boy, a street vendor standing nearby, and start punching and kicking him. It is the ambiguity of the film that children participated in the revolt against the French, but we have not seen this child do anything but be there. The group of ostensibly civilized Europeans see an Arab boy and try to kick him to death. (A French policeman pulls his unconscious body away from the mob.)

What drives a mob to try to kill a small boy for no other reason than being Arab in the vicinity of a terrorist act?  It is clear from the racial slurs that they yell during the assault that they would not have tried to kill a French boy.

The older I get the more I see fear as the source of the evil in my small part of the world and apparently the world at large. Fear of the other in particular seems to justify in the minds of the perpetrators a great deal of violence that they would normally condemn if it were visited upon themselves.

Now I speak as a Christian and acknowledge my ignorance in not speaking of other faiths (although I would be surprised if their views were different). At heart for a Christian, fear is an assessment that God will not take care of you and that it is time to switch teams.

Fearful violent folk rarely articulate their choice to obey Satan, and yet it is not God who calls upon us to hurt and kill folk who look different from us. Matthew 5-7 is pretty explicitly a call to do the opposite.

Perhaps those of my faith need to be more articulate in naming Chrinos (Christians In Name Only), particularly politicians, who advocate fear and violence (because they always go together), as apostates who have embraced Satan and Satan's ways. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Holiday Break

I have been teaching for 37 years now, and I go through many of the same things at the end of the Fall semester each year. There is relief at the completion of a significant task (teaching each of my classes) but there is a good deal of physical and mental weariness and aches. I could sleep for several days straight if not for my sleep disorder. By and large my mind is not very sharp and as an introvert I try to be pleasant with loved ones but am not outgoing at all. With age the feeling of being drained deepens in more and more ways. Of course this is when we have, almost every year, taken a road trip to visit birth families in the Northeast, a full day of driving each way, often involving winter weather far worse than what we are accustomed to in NC. I love my birth family members as well but as with my created family I am weary and not very outgoing. The conversation is rarely about me and my day-to-day life but rather about younger family members and family friends that I do not kn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Collective

Something good happened this week; I was informed of it yesterday when a colleague forwarded an email to me announcing it.  The announcement had to do with our university administration committing resources to something that needed doing; the fact that it had not been done had threatened the safety and work environment of dozens of my colleagues. I was clueless about it until in my job as ombudsperson I heard about it from multiple individuals. 95% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is focused on the individuals who come to me, brainstorming about their options and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each. I've been around my university for over 36 years so I've picked up some knowledge of our system and as a mathematician I have a lot of training and experience in problem-solving. I'm not bad at counseling stressed individuals; professional development at ombuds meetings has helped me a lot with that. 5% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is managing upward. The...
Post a Comment
Read more