As photos and bios are published of the seventeen tragically killed in the twin Paris terror attacks, the missing-in-action provide the best clues to the attacker's motivation. A few hundred “others” also murdered in the same week will have no memorial parade. Reuters reported 35 killed and dozens wounded by a bomb outside a police college in Saana, the capital of Yemen. Earlier the same week a bomb killed 26 at a cultural center in Ibb city. A suicide attack in Iraq killed 23 people. A bomb exploded outside Samarra killing 8 and wounded 23. Two child suicide bombers and another bomber are said to have killed hundreds in Nigeria in the name of Boko Haram. There will be no photos, bios or solemn marches because these dead are largely undocumented--meaning almost no one apparently is asking--and of course they are not “our” people.
The metaphor of stones appears in Luke’s gospel that tells of religious leaders asking Jesus to silence the crowds as he enters Jerusalem. The crowds are celebrating his struggle against their impoverishment: by Roman rule and corrupt religious leaders. Jesus replies “If these were silent the very stones would cry out.” Just so, these dead today, these “other” people, unacknowledged by our Western values, cry out.
Sony Pictures and Paris satirists (now sadly dead) make clear that anyone still searching for clues to the meaning of it all must grasp that the license they claim to celebrate freedom for inappropriate satire and bad films is a marker of their (and our) superiority. At the Golden Globe awards this week actress Tina Fey treated this superiority with appropriate irony. Feigning loyalty to Sony she reported North Korea’s bitter critique of its new film, “The Interview,” then snapped “and that wasn't the worst review it got…all of us were [forced] to pretend we wanted to see it.”
The very stones cry out in the videos of the senseless Staten Island police choke hold killing and the point blank shot police fired at a 12 year old in Cleveland. The police killings point to the new shape of race and class difference. It does not celebrate White, Western superiority—that idea is out of date, an expression of Ku Klux Klan liturgies and colonialist economic rationales. Instead, what we see is a settled world of permanent inequality and a picture of policing systems needed to discipline those who will never be winners. The World Bank provides clues to the new shape of things:
- Average Middle East and African Gross National income per capita is $3,456. In France it’s $41,420. In the U. S. it’s $53,960.
- The Pew Research Center reports on the fifty years gap between median incomes in the Hispanic and Black communities compared with white incomes. Today the gap is fifty-nine percent less income for Blacks and 60% less for Hispanics.
- Black incarceration rates are six times White rates. Latino rates three times greater.
That’s our Orwellian world today, dead bodies and all. Any hope of changing this lies now with the faith and human rights communities and must be dedicated to lots of shouting and civic action.
