Choosing not to know: The spiritual crisis that faces the nation

It’s a short account of what happened in Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995, just six years ago. It’s just about one person. The writer says, ‘It’s been six years now since that fateful 19 April. Yet I will never forget her pain-stricken face. Her soft words cut through the disturbing silence and pierced the hearts of everyone within earshot. “This was my baby!” she cried, as she held up a picture of her four-year-old daughter Ashley. “I want everyone to know what my little girl looks like in case they’ve seen her. If someone finds her please bring her to me, please”, she pleaded. “Please don’t stop searching for my little girl.”

‘Kathleen, the woman, stood in front of the shocked members of the press corps on a cool, spring night in Oklahoma City and meticulously recounted in detail the step-by-step moments of her normally mundane morning as she dressed and prepared Ashley for the day. Nothing could have prepared this 20-something-year-old mother for the news that a mere hour after she kissed her four-year-old daughter good-bye, someone had caused her child to die in a terrorist explosion.

‘For days, Ashley was one of hundreds of people unaccounted for as tired and disheartened search and rescue personnel lost hope of finding survivors amidst the twisted mass of concrete and steel that was once the Alfred P. Murrow Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Like countless other family members, all Kathleen could do was plead and pray.

‘It’s impossible to describe in words the scenes of human pain and anguish left behind of the largest act of terrorism on US soil. Literally thousands of people were touched by this tragedy, their lives transformed and scarred forever. The world knows that 168 people died. Hundreds of others were maimed and injured in the 4,800 pound bomb blast that ripped through the heart of the nine-story building and the nation, reminding each of us that evil exists, sin is real, and our life can be changed forever in an instant.’

Now I bring this event to your attention because it was reported last week in an interview that was done by two writers who are, in fact, I think, doing a book about Timothy McVeigh. And perhaps you’ve read about this. Timothy McVeigh refuses to accept any responsibility for the 168 deaths that the bomb blast caused and certainly wasn’t even aware of a youngster like Ashley, at least not in any real terms. He said he suspected there might be some children in the building, but he didn’t know there was a day care centre there.

But then do you know how he justifies what he did? He puts it in military terms, a term that our military use regularly, our government leaders use regularly. The term is ‘collateral damage’. For Timothy McVeigh, the killing of those youngsters – in fact, the killing of the whole 168 people was simply a case of collateral damage. Their lives had to be sacrificed for the greater good he claimed he was trying to achieve in bringing about a revolution against our government which he says has oppressed the indigenous peoples of our nation. He was very concerned that 19 April was a day on which a vicious attack had been made against some indigenous people by government authorities, and so these were collateral damage.

Now the reaction to that interview and that article on the part of anyone who read it, or heard about it, was outrage, total outrage. And justifiably so. But then where I believe there is a spiritual crisis in our nation is the fact that our Secretary of State, some years ago on that TV interview on ‘60 Minutes’ did not use quite the same words, ‘collateral damage’ when she was told about the 500,000 youngsters who had died in Iraq at that point and that was back in 1995 or ’96. She didn’t question the number whatsoever, she knows it was true. But her words were, ‘Well, it’s a hard decision, but we think it’s worth it.’ The 500,000 deaths of tiny children is worth something to the people of the United States. I’ve never been able to discover really what the ‘it’ is that makes the killing of these children worth it.

Lack of moral outrage

I believe that the fact that there is not absolute moral outrage in our nation when this sort of thing can be shown on ‘60 Minutes’ to an audience of millions of people, and everybody goes to work the next day without even thinking twice about it, is itself a moral outrage. To me, that’s a case of collateral damage and we justify it somehow. It’s a ‘hard decision’, yes, of course it’s a hard decision. I almost want to get vulgar in what I want to say in response to that, but I’ll try to be polite.

But that’s the situation which we face. I couldn’t help but think yesterday when I was over in the chapel at Riverside Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 4 April 1967, that powerful sermon he preached in which he took a totally different direction in his civil rights movement, made it an anti-war movement and a movement for the poor. But also, what he had said – and I’m not sure if it was in that sermon – but he said it on one occasion, he said that any nation that continues to spend more on programmes of defence than on programmes of social uplift is a nation approaching spiritual death.

And we’ve been doing that now, you know, he spoke those words back in the 1960s and we continue to do that year after year after year. And I think we are very close to a kind of spiritual death, where there is no outrage in this country, no moral condemnation. From every church, every religious community, you simply do not hear it on the Sabbath day or on Sunday. And the people of our nation are not responding.

And if we really want to make some moral judgements about what is happening in our country or about what is happening with regards to Iraq and our nation’s failure to react to it, the sanctions are really a continuation of the war and so any moral judgment or religious response that we make about the sanctions have to be made in the context of the [Gulf] War.

And shortly after the war ended in March 1991, the United Nations sent a committee over to Iraq to examine the situation there. The Under-Secretary General for Administration and Management on Humanitarian Needs in Iraq provided this report, it’s a small booklet. His general remarks at the beginning say: ‘I and the members of my mission were fully conversant with media reports regarding the situation in Iraq and of course with the recent World Health Organization/UNICEF report on water, sanitary and health conditions in the greater Baghdad area. It must be said, however, that nothing we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country of Iraq.

‘The recent conflict has brought near-apocalyptic results upon the economic infrastructure of what had been until January 1991 a highly urbanised and mechanised society. Now most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous. Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age with all the disabilities of post-industrial dependency on an intensive use of energy and technology.’

What he is saying is what General Michael Dugan said before the war started, perhaps you remember General Dugan, he was the head of our Air Force at the time, and he knew the plans that we had for Iraq, and he publicly stated that ‘We will bomb Iraq back into the Stone Age.’ Now, he was fired at the time because as usual our government did not really want us to know what was going to happen in Iraq – the kind of evil that we were going to perpetrate. So General Dugan was fired.

But this report makes it very clear that Iraq was reduced to a Stone Age-situation by the 42 days and nights of constant bombing. It was a direct attack against the people of Iraq, not that tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands were killed in those bombings, but the whole infrastructure of the nation was destroyed to make it impossible for the people to survive. That kind of warfare, beyond any doubt, must be condemned. I am convinced that no warfare is ever justified, but certainly a direct attack against people, non-military population, can never be justified.

War destroys the spirit

In March 1991, John Paul II, Bishop of Rome, issued a statement in which he said, ‘I, myself on the occasion of the recent tragic war in the Persian Gulf, repeated the cry, “Never again war, no, never again war which destroys the lives of innocent people, teaches how to kill, throws into upheaval even the lives of those who do the killing and leaves behind a trail of resentment and hatred, thus making it all the more difficult to find a just solution of the very problems which provoke the war.”’

That’s as clear a judgement about that war or any war, I believe, as any religious leader has ever made. And it’s so perceptive, I think, especially in pointing out that war not only destroys the lives of the innocent people in the country being attacked, but also teaches how to kill, destroys spiritually those who are doing the killing. You cannot learn to kill, learn to hate, without doing something to yourself as a human being. We’re made in the image of God, and God is love, and when we learn to hate and to kill, we are destroying the image of God within us, we’re destroying ourselves spiritually.

And then also John Paul points out, it makes it all the more difficult to find a just solution to the very problems which provoked the war. If we had wanted to find a solution to those problems, we could have, but we had a determination at the very beginning: that war was planned by the United States, we had war plans developed in 1990 ready to wage war against Iraq.

The only amazing thing I think is that based on my experience in visiting Iraq six times now, the people of Iraq do not have anger and hatred and resentment against the people of the United States. They are people who I think are not spiritually dead. And perhaps, if we could learn from them, we might save ourselves.

And so that war was not justified and certainly the sanctions since the war are not justified. At this point we know over one million people have died as a result of the sanctions. You look at those pictures and it will tear your heart. You go over there and you visit those hospitals, you go to the schools, you go into homes and you see on the street. It tears your heart, what you see. These sanctions are killing people.

One person whom I’ve come to know over there, has become a really good friend, is the Archbishop in Basra, Gabriel Kassab. And at one point he asked a delegation of us to bring back a message to the United States. It needs to be updated because at that point it was nine years, of course now it’s eleven. But the people of Iraq have been enduring tremendous difficulties and daily tragedies caused by lack of food, medicine, and the basic necessities of life. ‘The blockade imposed on us,’ he says, ‘has impoverished our people, depriving the poor of even plain bread and the simplest medicine. Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, has no supply of drinking water and little electricity. Epidemics rage, taking away infants and the sick by the thousands. Those children who survive disease succumb to malnutrition which stunts their physical and mental development. Our situation is unbearable and we appeal to people of conscience to work to end the blockade of Iraq.’

Clearly, this is what we must do. The sanctions continue the war. The war was a war against the people and the sanctions continue be a war against the people.

The most authoritative teaching authority within the Roman Catholic community is a council of all the bishops of the Church. In 1965, the Catholic bishops of the world were meeting at the Vatican Council and issued this statement about wars against people, a direct attack against innocent civilians: ‘Any act of war indiscriminately aimed at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and all humankind. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.’ And that clearly is the kind of judgement that we must make against our own government – again, Dr. King’s words, ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.’

Moral bankruptcy

What we are doing must be condemned without hesitation, without equivocation. It is morally bankrupt, totally depraved. I don’t know what other words to use to describe the immorality of what we’re doing. And I find it extremely ironic that President Clinton, when he was in office, would visit India during the last year of his last term in office, and would speak to the Indian parliament and would say to them: ‘I think that the targeting of innocent civilians is the worst thing about modern conflicts today and the extent to which more and more people seem to believe it is legitimate to target innocent civilians to reach their larger political goals, I think that’s something that has to be resisted at every turn.’

Again, doesn’t this show some kind of moral depravity when our President can speak in those words before the Parliament of India and at the same time be ordering the destruction of a country like Iraq. And yet none of us, for the most part, in this country stand up and say, ‘That is hypocrisy, that is evil, that has to be stopped.’

Tell the truth about what we’re doing. Don’t just plead to the people of India to give up their nuclear weapons. Plead with the people of the United States to give up our nuclear weapons, but also in this case to stop the killing of the people of Iraq. There is no doubt whatsoever that what is happening with the war and the sanctions must be morally and totally condemned. There is no other judgement that can be made about this. This has become absolutely clear to me.

Media responsibility

But we’re also concerned about what is happening with the media in our country and why this moral outrage doesn’t come forth in all the various media outlets that we have – the press, the television, and so on. And I do think that there is a very serious responsibility here.

There is a lack in the religious news outlets. There’s a tremendous lack, certainly, in the secular media. They simply refuse to report what is happening because they’re corporations that are trying to make money. We all know that’s the case, that’s the main thing that’s happened to our media in this country, they belong to Disney or to GE or whatever. And corporate profits are more important than disturbing people, challenging our nation. We don’t really have a free press anymore. It’s a paid-for press, it’s a bought press, bought by our government. And so we don’t find the challenge there.

But then I want to push this one step further. It’s one thing – and any of us could get up here and knock the media, condemn them for what they fail to do. But the failure goes beyond the media. There are other ways of being in touch with the people of this nation: through our churches, through our mosques, through our synagogues, through all of the religious community.

But it isn’t happening there. People will go to church week after week after week and they will not hear these issues raised. There’s something lacking in the religious leadership and in the general religious population, those of us who claim to act out of faith. We’re failing to communicate the message to our brothers and sisters, in our homes, in our neighbourhoods, in our communities, in our religious situations, in the churches or whatever. We all have a responsibility to spread this word, and we need to do it and we need to find a dramatic way somehow to bring this to the attention of those who say they operate out of faith.

I have a sense that what is happening in our country is the same thing that happened in Nazi Germany back in the 1930s and the early ’40s. A number of years ago I read a book called Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer, who was head of the armament industry for Nazi Germany, thought of as the third-ranking member of the Nazi hierarchy. He was the only one who pleaded guilty at Nuremberg and was sentenced to life in prison and so he had the opportunity to write his memoirs.

But the thing that I will never forget from reading that book is where he says early on that he, like others in Germany, were often asked the question, ‘Didn’t you know what was going on? Didn’t you see those trains with the cattle cars filled with people? Didn’t you know about the chemical plants making the chemicals that were used to asphyxiate and kill people in the death camps? Didn’t you know about the crematoria? Didn’t you know any of that?’

And Albert Speer was very honest in his response. He said, ‘We wanted not to know.’ And I have a sense that that’s what’s going on in this country. We choose not to know.

Now there were some exceptions in Germany. There were some people who knew what was going on and were determined to do something about it and so I’m not condemning all Germans by any means. But I am saying that there is, I think, a very valid comparison to what happened in Nazi Germany and how Nazi Germany could evolve and develop and become the aggressor nation that it was because people in Nazi Germany wanted not to know what was going on.

And the comparison, I think, is so real for us, out in the streets of this country, people do not want to know what is happening. They prefer to worry about the stock market going up and down, that sort of thing. They don’t want to know about what’s going on in Iraq. Don’t disturb us.

I often think about Clinton’s first campaign: ‘The economy, stupid.’ That was their motto. Everything, it was ‘the economy.’ People in the United States only care about their own well-being. No other issue matters. It’s the economy, stupid. Don’t you know that?

What’s that say about us? He won the election on that basis and got a second term, practically on the same basis. Everything’s going smoothly, so re-elect him. Don’t worry that he ruined welfare. Don’t worry that he hasn’t done much for the poor of this nation. Don’t worry about all the other things that happened that were very negative. As long as everything’s smooth in the economy, that’s all we care about.

Now I may be overstating it, but I think not. I really believe we’re getting close to the point of spiritual death that Dr King spoke of because we clearly are using far more of our resources for programmes of so-called ‘defence’. The next thing will be the nuclear missile defence where we will spend billions of dollars – not to get defensive capability but offensive capability. It’s all about first strike capability, that’s what it’s about. China and Russia know that. Obviously, they’re utterly opposed to it. People of the United States say, ‘Don’t tell us, we’d rather not know what we’re preparing to do to the planet when we use nuclear weapons.’

Somehow, we have to bring ourselves out of this spiritual dying.

Perhaps I can conclude with two stories about two different people. One was on a trip to Iraq. Immediately after we visited a home for the elderly as our group came out of the home and was walking back down the street, a crowd of people was coming the other way. At the front of the crowd was a youngster, a little boy, and a woman who I thought right away was his mother, but it turned out to be his grandmother. And clearly they wanted to speak to us. [Former U.S. Attorney General] Ramsey Clark and I were right at the front of the crowd and as we approached they came up to us. And the first thing that I noticed was – you couldn’t help but notice this – the youngster was smallish and I thought he was probably about seven or eight years old. It turns out he was eleven, but he had been malnourished all of his life and so his physical growth was stunted, he looked like a seven or eight-year-old youngster.

But then, what was even more difficult to look at, actually, was his face. The whole right side of his face had been torn away. There was no eye there, it was just scar tissue, the whole right side of his face, and he had lost sight in his left eye also. And this little kid, when he was just two years old, had been playing with another youngster about the same age when bombs hit Baghdad, and they were hit by shrapnel, the other youngster was killed immediately and this youngster survived but with this terrible result of being so horribly crippled, deformed, and loosing his eyesight.

But his message was very simple. When we chatted with him and his grandmother, they simply asked us one thing, or the little boy did, specifically. He said, ‘Will you please ask your government to stop the sanctions? Please stop doing this to us.’

And I’ve shared that many, many times and it does have an impact on people when you begin to think about a youngster like this, pleading with us, ‘Stop what you’re doing to us. Stop killing us. Stop maiming us.’

The courage to change a nation

Finally, I’ll tell you about a person in Central America, a woman whom I met there a number of years ago, and it was an extraordinary experience. This was a very tiny village just outside of San Salvador. The village was made up of people who had been internal refugees. They had been given an area of land by the Archdiocese of San Salvador to re-form themselves into a village and they had based the whole village economy on a co-operative system. They were working outside the scope of the Salvadoran economy and the Salvadoran government which they were opposed to.

Now they were not armed. They were not part of the violent revolutionary movement that was going on. But because they were, in a sense, standing up against the government, they were constantly harassed. Soldiers would come through the village and burn their crops at times or kill some of their animals.

And as we sat there visiting with these people – there was a small delegation of us with the 10 or 12 people who made up the council of the village – one of the people in that group said to this woman, ‘Marta, why don’t you tell them what just happened to you?’ And so she did. She had been abducted and it was just within the last two or three weeks. The soldiers said they wanted to interrogate her, ask her questions. What they wanted to find out from her was the names of people in the village, families who had family members in the hills that had joined the revolution, people who had given up on trying to bring about non-violent revolutionary change which they were committed to, but – and I can understand sometimes people get that desperate – they had turned to violence as a last resort.

But Marta would not give the names because if she did, those families would immediately be identified as Marxist. For the government of El Salvador, if you were against the government, you were a Marxist. And if you were a Marxist your name could appear on the death lists and you would be killed.

So Marta refused to give any names whatsoever. And she said at first, during the interrogations, they just kept hollering, shouting at her, demanding that she answer. And she kept refusing, and she said that after a while – it lasted a day or two –she said they began to beat her with their fists and with the butts of their rifles. And then, she said, finally, in an interrogation period as they were beating her, they just tore all her clothes off. She said, ‘Then they did to me what they wanted.’ And of course it was violent and degrading.

And then they let her go. They told her, ‘Look, we’ll let you go this time, but the next time we’ll come back and we will kill you.’

As Marta was telling this, I really was quite overwhelmed by it and quite amazed. First of all, because she spoke so serenely. She smiled, even, was very gentle, very much at peace. And I knew that I was talking with someone who really had understood what it meant to follow Jesus Christ. You love your enemy, you forgive those who hurt you, you return good for evil.

Now I know we’re all supposed to do that if we follow Jesus, and yet, a lot of the times I’m afraid we don’t. And so when you really come across someone whose done it, it’s amazing, you’re overwhelmed. And I was. But then the second thing that amazed me was, why was she still here? They could come back any time, and the next time they would kill her.

So I asked her. Well, she just smiled almost like she would say, well, I’ve got to teach you a couple of things. She said, ‘I have to make sure you understand what it’s like in this country.’ And so then she began to tell very briefly about the terrible disparity between the rich and the poor. And she concluded by saying, ‘It’s not right that so few have so much and so many have so little. That’s not right.’ And once she was sure I could understand that, then she said, ‘And we are going to change that.’ That’s why she stayed, because ‘We’re going to change it. We’re going to change it.’

Now my challenge to all of us and to anyone who can hear this message: If a woman like Marta, a peasant woman probably never went through eight grades of schooling, she can look around at her society and see what her government is doing. She can look around and see that things are not right. She can discover it. You mean to tell me we in this country can’t do the same thing? We can’t find out what’s wrong?

I’m sure we can. We have to have some determination, perhaps, probably not even as much as Marta needed, though, to really discover what is going on. But then the second thing we need is the kind of courage that Marta had to say that we are going to change it, no matter what the cost. She was ready to be tortured, to be killed in order to change what was wrong to make it right.

So we have to ask ourselves, What are we willing to do in order to change it, to bring our government to its senses? To make our nation a nation that cares about its spiritual development again, to make our nation a nation that can do the right thing? Do we have the courage to change it?

Thomas J. Gumbleton is Bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit, USA.