A Question without answers

 

So first about me: I’m a do-gooder, nominally motivated by my faith, preaching way more than I’m practicing, so, a hypocrite, if not a dangerous one. I’m both mystified and disappointed by people and movements that turn their words and actions increasingly toward misanthropy and away from the mother-love they experienced in their infancy.  

               Oh, I know. ‘Twas ever thus since Cain killed Abel (and way before that, actually), through the Battle of Hastings, the Peasant Wars, the World Wars, and all the millennia of political warfare, social and ethnic strife—it all bugles the mind (pun intended). Much like all these have shown repeatedly, this rape of Ukraine by Russia will prove again that violence begets violence, and that every shot fired at a neighbour proceeds first through the shooter’s foot. “Therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee!” (John Donne)

               I donate to Community Peacemaker Teams, Mennonite Central Committee, Amnesty International, Mennonite Disaster Service, MC Canada Witness Program and to my conference and church, presuming that the dollars will serve to bring the world closer to Christ’s many appeals for love, peace, justice and mercy. It’s hard to keep trusting that hope when my very neighbours are turning toward the kick-ass view of the world and saying “To hell with ‘love your neighbour.’ I’m gonna get me some. Me, me, me.”

               Perhaps the way of sorrows, the path of suffering is the only path there is. Perhaps human nature is simply flawed to the point where Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience—if you accept the allegory—was predictable, even predestined. If not in their creation, then in their evolution.

               And yet, there are many men and women who are kind, generous and sociable, who practice justice and mercy with strength and humility. Men and women who work well with others, negotiate and compromise when they disagree. Know how to forgive and accept forgiveness.

Does misanthropy, selfishness pop up in members of the population like a gene mutation? Or does it hinge on training principles, like the difference between a “bad dog” and a “good doggie” reflects on the owner’s inability to train and educate? This seems to me to be a critical question impinging on child rearing and educational practices.

   If it’s all in the genes, well, we’re obviously screwed.

           As we watched the news last night, Agnes turned to me and asked, “What can we do to help?” The standard answer around here is that we should pray for the people of Ukraine. We’ve already personally donated two weeks of income to the Mennonite Centre in Molochansk; we could send more, and then even more than the more—our credit is good. I’ve put an appeal on Facebook for donations connected to International Women’s Day, March 8. I mused about finding a way to get over there (maybe to Zaporozhje[i] where my ancestors came from) and perhaps I could shout at the Russian soldiers to go home, hand out tracts like the leaflets dropped on competing armies in WWII telling soldiers that their wives and girlfriends were cheating on them at every opportunity.

           But I am answerless. I’ve seen enough of war to know that contrary to much of the Christian world’s protests, no God makes us do wars, no God decides to allow us to practice brutalities on each other, and no God reaches down to pluck out the tanks and mortars and bombers in order to prevent the spilling of innocent blood. Our religions serve us only as far as they both energize and give us direction for our behaviours, and nobody else’s. You would like to see God? Just look down at your hands. Whatever they do is what your God does, from rescuing children to mowing them down in the street.

           Is our “peacemaker” role in this world, then, anymore than a pipe dream? Not at all. If your hands and my hands reach out to the suffering, even in something as crass, as small as writing a cheque for a few thousand dollars rather than buying a newer car, haven’t we introduced the “God of Justice and Mercy” to the world? What more can anyone do?  

                 

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[i] The spelling in English of this city’s name varies. I’ve even seen it spelled two ways in one tourism website belonging to Ukraine.

Zaporozhye, Kiev, Moscow and Batoche

The Capture of Batoche - French Metis vs English Colonialists (borrowed from Wikipedia)

My great-grandfather lived his entire life on and near the banks of the Dnieper River, inside the area we now know as Ukraine, specifically on the outskirts of current-day Zaporozhye:

In 1789 Mennonites from Prussia accepted an invitation from Catherine the Great and settled in what became the Chortitza Colony, northwest of Khortitsya island. Mennonite-owned mills and factories were built in Alexandrovsk and later expropriated by the Communist government. After the Russian Revolution [they] emigrated, fled as refugees, or were deported from the area. Currently few Mennonites live in Zaporozhye. Mennonite buildings still exist in the area and in the other main Mennonite colony center, current day Molochansk. (A cursory and mainly accurate account from Wikipedia)

It wasn't the Mennonites' religion so much as their ethnicity and their economic dominance that rankled the Russian authorities in 1914 and onward, and for which their lives were gradually made unbearable. My family had left much earlier.  After my great-grandfather died, his widow and offspring emigrated and settled in the Rosthern area in 1892-3.

     Note that it was Moscow that called all the shots for the region we now call Ukraine, not Kiev.

     The degree to which ethnicity and language continue to act as divisive markers continues to be as tragic a presence in the region as it was when the Russian Revolution overran the area. Putin's excuse for sending troops into the Crimea is ethnically driven in part--along with strategic considerations, of course:

“Putin has defied calls from the West to pull back his troops, insisting that Russia has a right to protect its interests and Russian-speakers in Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine.” (http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ukraine-president-sounds-alarm-as-russian-military-gains-ground-in-crimea-1.2556858)

The psychology of all this is complicated, but it's probably safe to say that my German-speaking ancestors fared better in Canada than they did under absolutist monarchies and communist dictatorship because here they had landed in a working democracy with a bit of experience in multiculturalism and multiethnicism. They were scorned for their unwillingness to bear arms during the World Wars, but the most Canada would do to express this resentment was to require their participation in forced labour camps as “conscientious objectors.” (Herding Japanese-Canadians into concentration camps was another matter; being of European descent apparently stood for something.)

     It's easy to come to too-broad conclusions about the conflict in Ukraine. Some media are portraying it as Russia and the West engaging in a tug-of-war for the hearts and minds—and the loyalties—of Ukrainian citizens. Others interpret it economically: Ukraine is an economic basket case currently dependent for survival on outside help, some preferring that it come from the East (the ethnically Russian), and some looking westward for a better, more modern future (the ethnically Ukrainian). It's probably accurate to say that whatever the immediate causes of the conflict, the deeper ones are a combination of grinding dissatisfaction with national poverty and ethnic and political animosities reaching way back in history to the Czars and the old Soviet Union.

     The closest we come to the Russian/Ukrainian divide here in Canada has to be the French/English “situation.” As in the Ukraine, we have here two distinct groups, both of which are large enough to affect the economic, nationalist aspirations of the other. It's probably naive to think that the kind of dangerous confrontation currently building between the two groups in the Ukraine could never occur in Canada, hard to imagine as that may be. Perhaps it seems so unlikely because there are elements in a working democracy that keep us reaching for negotiated conclusions and not for rifles. It's been a long time since we resorted to guns to settle differences here in Canada; where I live, since 1885 at Batoche and Duck Lake.

     As for protesting and ousting the government through demonstrations, have you been outside today? It's a frozen hell out there!

     Harper, you're safe until the next election, at least. That's the way we deal with unpopular leaders here in Canada. Yawn.