What if you’re eating potato chips three meals a day? What if you’re only offered potato chips for snacks at school or work and when you relax in the evening? And what if all the cool, beautiful and powerful people are eating potato chips? Even if you occasionally snuck a piece of broccoli (a step in the right direction), you’re still going to be sick and oily.
Something has been bothering me for a bit: How does US military action against Muslims affect my psyche, my kids, maybe even the broad sweep of American culture?
The question right now isn’t the degree to which military actions are justified or moral, although such ideas merit consideration. Rather, how do those actions affect us?
Here are some gut-churning realities:
- The US has been at war with Muslim countries for most of my adult life. If we pin Operation Desert Storm in 1990 as the starting point, around half of the US population has known hardly a day in which we were not fighting Muslims.
- If you’re going to keep fighting Muslims and keep getting elected (Both sides have done this!), you must portray Muslims as evil, enemies and wholly “other.”
- The “potato chips everywhere” metaphor is this: We used to take action against Communism (We still do a little.). We used to engage in war on drugs (We still do some.). But for over half my life it’s been Muslims! They’ve been enemies on the battlefield. They’ve been villains in movies and books. They’ve been the boogie man, the dirty, sneaky savages in countless efforts to gain or retain political positions. A piece of broccoli here and there will not do the trick.
Shame on us and God have mercy.
Is this because of Israel and our desire to protect that country? It is the oil? Is it because they’re are easy to identify and caricaturize? Probably all that and more.
What are we to do?
For starters: Be the broccoli. Read and share the counter-narrative, starting with Jesus and going on from there. And ask God for a new day, not a new villain. We’ve had so many over our short history. But a fresh light inside and going forth from our country so that the glow from the “city on a hill” is the love of Christ, not the flash of a muzzle or the launch of a missile.