BENEATH THE SKYLINE

DISAPPOINTMENT IS WHAT I FEEL
Philosophical Ramblings for a Broken World

Deborah Good

What to say. I am well; we are all well. I wanted my short email home to open like a window, offering a glimpse of the deeply troubling world I was visiting. The date was June 6. The location: Jerusalem.

The days are full, which has likewise filled our minds and conversations with new information, anguish, confusion, hope, and utter hopelessness at the situation here—which truly has more parallels to apartheid, and to the domination of Native Americans, than I ever before understood.

I was on a two-week learning tour in Palestine and Israel. We stayed at the very southern edge of Jerusalem for the first week, and from the roof, I took pictures of the not-so-little town of Bethlehem, which lay just to the south.

Whatever peaceful images I’d had of a quiet town sleeping beneath a shining star have been shot to high heaven. In reality, Bethlehem today is a prison. The Palestinian city is surrounded by walls, fences, Israeli-only roads, and settlements of homes built by Israelis on land confiscated from Palestinians without approval from the international community.

All of the occupied West Bank has been similarly cut to bits by walls, fences, checkpoints, roads, and settlements, making a "two-state solution" all the more hypothetical. Violence springs from within these isolated enclaves of Palestinians like leaks from a clogged sewage line.

I am learning a lot, I wrote, becoming passionate and angry, and wondering, as always, if there’s any way to take that anger back with me to the United States (which, by the way, has fed the occupation here with 100 billion dollars of Israeli aid since 1948) and do something productive with it.

Many maps of Israel, drawn by Israel, do not demarcate the area internationally recognized as the West Bank, showing only splotches of color where Palestinians are given some civil authority. I took a pen to one of the travel maps we were given and sketched, as accurately as I could, my own kidney-bean-shape outline of the Palestinian territory on the west bank of the Jordan River. This was not only an attempt to educate myself; it was a tiny act of protest.

The suffering caused by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict runs deep as the oceans and, with a little interpretation, extends very quickly into Syria, Lebanon, and, of course, Iraq. If we really tune in, I believe it extends into every one of our living rooms and daily routines. Still, just about everyone I met during my short stay in the Middle East—Palestinians and Israelis alike—treated me with kindness and generosity.

I have been trying to explain for myself how these things happen. It seems to me that most of the people in the world are good-hearted, well-intentioned, and wonderful to each other most of the time. How is it, then, that Israeli settlers can throw rocks at children on their way to school? How is it that Palestinian teenagers can be convinced to blow themselves up in acts of gruesome retaliation—and absolute despair?

"This has to stop," wrote Rachel Corrie in one of her last e-mails to her parents. Corrie was killed in 2003 by a bulldozer, while standing between it and a Palestinian home.

Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world. This is not what they are asking for now.

I recently heard these words spoken from a stage, in a play called My Name is Rachel Corrie, which was adapted by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner from the young activist’s writings . I’m always hunting for words that help me make sense of my life, and one of hers is very appropriate. Disappointment is what I feel.

It’s a familiar sensation, the same skin-to-bone incredulity that hit when an indigenous woman in Guatemala described for me how paramilitaries tore into her community and picked up children by their ankles, swinging them against walls like baseball bats. I felt it too when I read in the paper just last week about a young man killed in a Philadelphia neighborhood shooting.

The question that grows up inside me is this: Do people act in both wonderful and unspeakably hurtful ways because we are by nature good or bad—or because we are guided by our upbringings, our access to resources, and the social structures in which we live?

Much of my life, I have held tightly to a belief that human beings, at their core, are good. Talking over beers with a friend earlier this summer, I put it this way: "One of the bases of my understanding of the world, I think, is that all people, in their given contexts, are doing the best they can with what they’ve got."

That base is becoming shaky for me, or at least more ambiguous. Whether we’re cooking supper, paying our taxes, or fighting a war, just about everything we do causes an incalculable mix of joy and suffering in the world. We are imperfect, no doubt. But we mostly do what makes good sense to us, and there are reasons—stated and unstated—for our actions. We act out of love. We act out of greed. We act out of fear, convenience, and desperate need.

The problem is that the collective whole of our micro-actions, even if individually well-intentioned, have added up to create destructive macro-systems and a planet plagued by pollution, widespread inequality, and unending violence.

I still think that it is extremely rare for someone to be motivated primarily by a desire to cause harm. I therefore say this: Never judge others before trying to understand their "why." Asking "why?" is essential to breaking cycles of violence and retribution. Why are there suicide bombers coming out of Gaza? Why is Israel building walls in the West Bank? Why did several men, over the years, threaten my dad with weapons and demand money? And why did I, just yesterday, ignore the woman who asked me for help on the street?

Most things have explanations—societal and personal. This never means that terrible acts are justified, but it does mean that the judgment of others should always happen in conversation, though it so rarely does. Before any pacifist points fingers at military leaders for their participation in the war machine, it is crucial that we try to understand why they are there. And what if we, as a nation, had not jumped to point fingers and retaliate after the tragedies of 9-11 and had instead asked, "Why did this happen?"

These, dear reader, are my brief philosophical ramblings for a broken world. I have already exceeded the 1,000 words I was given to write, yet I have hardly begun. The story of global wrongdoing and injustice is more complicated than I know enough to tell, and yet here I am. I live amid that story—we all do.

Sometimes, in Guatemala, Palestine, or on the streets of Philadelphia, I am indeed disappointed. I expect more from humanity. I want to demand it. But disappointment is only part of the story. I am learning that even as we work to change all that is toxic, unjust, and unbearably wrong in the world, we must be on the lookout for beauty, for insight, for gratitude. If we keep our eyes open, if we peer into every sidewalks’ cracks and into the eyes of the people we meet, we will—by golly—always, always find it.

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a Master of Social Work student at Temple University. She realizes this edition of her column is quite heavy and recommends following it up with a romantic comedy and a good bowl of ice cream. But then, keep on reading, researching, and living, full of passion and conscience. You may want to start by reading "An Open Letter to Mennonite Church USA Congregations" at www.peace.mennolink.org/resources/palestineletter/. She also welcomes your thoughts and arguments at deborahagood@gmail.com.