"I weep for my country"

He was a big, macho student leader but tears were in his eyes. We were standing at a central location in the historic city of Bratislava. It was only days before the brief life of the post modern Czechoslovakia was to end and the country to be divided into 2 separate nations – the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

What saddened this young man was the character of what he saw before him. The Xenophobia, the hostility, the distrust, the loss of hope, the erosion of the opportunity of a rare moment in history to create something which celebrated a grand history with a promising future.

History and political commentators will judge better than I whether that division was for the better or not. But an analysis of its merits is not the point of this posting. Rather it is the indelible recollection of the words and visible pain of this young leader. He literally was weeping for his country.

I find these words reverberating within me as I try to make sense of the events of the last couple of weeks: the unsettling vitriol cast at Muslim Americans who wished to relocate a cultural center to a more central location in New York; the evident bankruptcy of our long term energy policies and the resultant helplessness as primordial waste we call oil pollutes our shores and seas, the profound sadness of self defeating approaches in the middle east conflicts [pick one], the collapse of national economies built on undisciplined and unrestrained spending threatening the weal of the Western world…. Need one go on? It would be hard to find a country which would not inspire weeping.

What is worse than the sense of sadness is watching the reactions of those whose disillusionment leads to extremism, anarchy, and anger. And what is even worse is our fear and passivity as we watch those who take advantage of those feelings for self serving political aims – whose solutions are simply to reject order and the validity of governments, whose implicit platforms are rejection of the “other” – or at least any social responsibility for others. Those “others” might be neighbors of another color or creed or national origin; those “others” might be neighboring countries; those “others” might simply be those whose views differ. But make no mistake, there is a growing suspicion, even hatred of the “other” in our own backyards, wherever in the world that backyard may be.

Silence and inaction in the face of intolerance, history teaches, only emboldens those voices. It is easy to be accepting, tolerant, and beneficent when the circumstances seem positive and there is only gain for all. It is harder, but matters more, for us to raise our voices and insistence on those values when the circumstances challenge.

Now is such a time. Let those of us who affirm civil discourse, an interrelated and interdependent world, a belief that there is room for diversity of vision, belief and skin color, that there is still time for courageous leadership which affirm human values and caring societies, that there is still heart within each of us large enough to care and minds with space to dream – let us raise our voices for just such a world.

For if not, if not, if not, we will surely weep for more than our country; we shall weep for our world.