I haven't yet been able to articulate a reaction to the horrific bombings that happened in Boston on Monday during the annual marathon. So many people, including my colleague Tyler, have already written poignant reactions, and so many more are off doing the hard, necessary, and fundamentally good work of getting on the ground and helping people to recover from the violence.
Thank you to all of those people.
I'd like to talk about a discourse that immediately emerged after news of the bombings began to spread -- the discourse concerning the value of human life transcending national borders. I've seen plenty of articles and Facebook statuses lamenting that Americans cry outrage when Americans die in violence like what we saw in Boston, but don't nearly value the lives and deaths of people outside of our borders in areas of the world where violence is more quotidian.
There's something right about that. And it's ok to point that out. It is perfectly possible to sincerely mourn for the victims of what was truly a horrific and inexcusable act of violence and at the same time to be aware of and give attention to the political discourses and contexts which surround the violence.
I was reading from Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals last night, and I found myself thinking about the bombings in Boston and the discourse I just cited above. Specifically, the paragraph which grabbed my attention begins by asserting that "the community has the same basic relationship to its members as the creditor to the debtor." Two things came to mind: (1) a conceptualization of debt which I believe is an appropriate way of talking about the violence of the bombings and the discourse of global violence recited in reaction, and (2) a questioning of who gets to be included in the kind-of-racist Nietzsche's "community," and by analogy/extension, what do we mean by community and who are we (not) talking about when we invoke the discourse of global awareness of violence following a horrible tragedy within out own borders?
Amidst all of the talk about financial debt we are surrounded by every day in our political and economic discourses, I think we should also consider talking about moral debt. Taking the Boston Marathon bombings as an example:
What happened on Monday was horrible, and definitely tragic. No question. But it is also important to be aware of the fact, as some folks remind us, that what surprises us here in the United States is much more common in places like Syria or Palestine. Really, there is a kind of privilege to living in a country where we can afford to be surprised by violence like this (can we afford it, though?). Just think, those of us who were born here were simply lucky enough to be born here. We didn't do anything to earn our place. And yet we benefit from the fact that we are part of the American community. I would therefore suggest that those of us who fit this description thus owe a moral debt (and this is not a novel or profound argument; Socrates makes a version of it in Plato's "Crito"), we must pay back for the benefits we enjoy by doing what we can to mitigate violence like this from happening anywhere in the future, even if such violence is being carried out by our own country, and even if it's being ordered or approved by people we admire or support.
But that whole last paragraph has an obvious difficulty in it. Who counts as part of the American community? And why is the mapping of quotidian violence as always something that happens exclusively outside of U.S. borders so easily accessible when we want to make a point about making sure we remain aware of violence that affects people everywhere? I would like to remind folks that quotidian violence is not exclusively relegated outside of U.S. borders. For many people of color in the United States, especially folks living in cities, there is the constant threat of police violence coming out of anywhere at anytime, sometimes for no reason other than because someone looks like they're not white. Day-to-day violence is not foreign to U.S. soil.*
So again, I must ask, even in this moment as we rally around calls to unite all people in one common identity -- "We are all Bostonians;" "There are no Democrats or Republicans, just Americans" -- who are we really calling? Who gets to be part of these communities? What violence is erased by the call to look outward for examples of people who don't get to live with the privilege of being surprised by violence?
What happened in Boston was a tragedy. I cannot repeat that enough. I was devastated by it. Luckily, neither I myself nor any of my loved ones were physically harmed by the bombings. I think it is important for us to mourn and to do what we can to support those communities that need support at this time of darkness. As my friend Tyler wrote, we've got to kick.
But we should also think about the debt we might owe, a different kind of debt, not necessarily monetary, but moral. Those of us who were lucky enough to not be in Boston, lucky enough to have been born in the United States, lucky enough to have a body that is not policed by quotidian violence or interrogated and examined for its worthiness in being included in the national body politic, those of us who are that lucky, we owe it to our fellow human beings to do what we can with the abilities and resources at our disposal to work towards building a world where violence is rarer for everyone.
That's a debt we can certainly work towards paying.
*I should point out that I am not drawing an equals sign between an individual being harassed by police officers and hundreds of people being injured in a bombing. These are admittedly not the same exact thing. But I would insist, however, that violence is violence. And that matters.
No comments:
Post a Comment