Moving Away From Diversity

The news from Iraq this morning was discouraging. People fled from a Shiite village near Mosul as Sunni militants approached. They found refuge in a nearby Christian village but they will not be able to stay there forever and will probably end up fleeing to southern Iraq where Shias are in the majority. While the official position of the Iraqi government is to oppose partition of the country along ethnic and sectarian lines, is it possible for Iraq to remain a united and diverse country? 

 

One can lay some of the blame for the situation in Iraq on the failure of the government to live up to its commitment to include Sunnis. But wasn't that failure also a symptom of a more widespread trend in the world? The sectarian cleansing of northern Iraq by the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) looks a lot like the ethnic cleansing a generation ago in what was once Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda. The quest for purity, whether ethnic or sectarian or ideological, often ends in blood.

 

The news here in the United States is also discouraging. Here in Massachusetts we appear to be evenly divided between those who support and those who oppose Governor Patrick's plan to house in he Commonwealth some of the refugee children from Central America. While legitimate questions can be raised about the plan, there is something very disturbing about the argument of some Baystaters that the children  don't share our culture. And it's not just around this particular crisis that we see responses like this. A recent Facebook comment about the situation in Gaza asserted that all Israelis are scum and should be killed. A performer, some of whose concerts have been cancelled recently, referred to his critics as "unclean vermin" and once referred to President Obama as "a subhuman mongrel." (He did apologize for that remark.) Even if we were to disregard such crude and racist comments we could still see examples of the tribal tendency in our country. Ideologues on both the right and the left see themselves as the real Americans. Liberal Christians and conservative ones often see other Christians as not really Christians at all.

 

I am reminded of a comment that Tom Clancy made after the September 11 attacks. Until then, he said, he hadn't thought of New Yorkers as living in the same country that he did. I am also reminded of one line from Janis Ian's Society's Child - "stick to your own kind." We do have a tendency to do that, to flock together with people like us, to be a bit uncertain about whether people in other parts of the country are so unlike us that we really have nothing in common with them. There is probably nothing terribly wrong about that, but when we begin to let those tendencies and those questions become dominant we add to the world's trouble. It's not that saying that the President is not a real American is tantamount to sectarian cleansing. Far from it, but there is a danger that our tendency to make such judgments makes the move towards the partition of Iraq, though not the sectarian cleansing, acceptable.  

 

I don't know if Iraq can remain a nation of diverse people. We don't seem to be doing all that well with the challenge here. What I do know is that the more divided we become the less ability we will have to help other nations to live peaceably with diversity.