Reflections of Tragedy, II

We it not for the horrendous events at Virginia Tech this week, the news may have been filled with tragedy from another part of the world. News reports from the inside pages of the newspapers indicate that this has been a difficult week in Iraq and its capital city Baghdad. On Tuesday, 85 people were found dead throughout the country. On Wednesday, there were multiple bombings in Baghdad, killing 230 people. As noted in my previous post, The American Heritage Dictionary defines tragedy as “a disastrous event, especially one involving distressing loss or injury to life.” This loss of life is also distressing.

I don’t wish to make many connections between Baghdad and Blacksburg. It is not helpful to compare pain and suffering. Each event must be seen as a unique occurrence. The relationship is simply between events that happened in the same time frame, and in the tragic nature of both events.

Tragedy raises questions. The Virginia Tech tragedy has led us to ask about campus security, about our mental health care system, about the balance between respect for autonomy and the common good. Some of the questions about why things happened the way they did in Blacksburg will never be fully answered.

The events in Baghdad this past week lead me to ask if our very presence there, and by “our” I mean the United States military, is contributing negatively to the on-going tragic loss of life. I wonder if there is another kind of tragedy in the making. The American Heritage Dictionary offers another definition of tragedy. A tragedy may also be “a drama or a literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances.” Will the drama of the Iraq war become an American tragedy? Will the suffering there escalate because we, as a nation, overestimated the ability of a military force to bring about democratic reform in a deeply divided country or underestimated the fractiousness that might result in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Sadaam Hussein? Might our tragic flaw turn out to be that before we even went to war, we ignored some of the information that indicated both these challenges might be very real?

Tragedy raises questions. As a person of Christian faith, with peacemaker as a part of the job description, I need to ask these questions, as troubling as they may be. Not to do so would be tragic in its own way.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

A COUPLE MORE QUOTES FOR THE WEEK

Many oppressors and many more victims and very few healers. Albert Camus

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.
(a stanza from the poem “Hope” Lisel Mueller, Alive Together. LSU Press, 1996)

*As a person of faith, healer is also part of the job description; and I think there may be a little more to know of God than hope, but hope is one sure and significant sign.