Something There Is...

My Aunt Anna was a dues-paying member of the John Birch Society. Another aunt and an uncle were members, too, but Aunt Anna talked to me more often about the Birch Society beliefs than the others did. I heard her say once that she was afraid that liberals were creeping into the Society. I sent her a UNICEF card for Christmas one year. I think she was rather pleased to get a card from me, but she hastened to tell me, “We don’t believe in the United Nations, you know.” She saw the union of nations as a sign of the end times, as something engineered by the forces of the anti-Christ.

Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall,” suggests that the forces of nature work against dividing walls—winter frost heaving up the ground to make the stones fall away from one anther. He’d rather

have the walls down and live in harmony, while his neighbor was sure that “good fences make good neighbors.” Aunt Anna would have agreed with the neighbor.

My first and last post to “Bridge People” was made on August 17. Of 2013, I hasten to add. Before and since, I’ve thought of many people, famous and less well known, who have lived, who now live, as bridges in a world divided by so many mean chasms. But I couldn’t get myself to write about them. Maybe continuing to maintain two blogs is more than I can handle along with all my other projects. And maybe, Robert Frost to the contrary, there is something in nature or something in the energy of the world that

does not love a bridge. Maybe my inertia has been fostered by an energy striving to preserve divisions, to keep the chasms unbridgeable. Politicians and pundits slice up the United States into red and blue. Partisans look at a proposed bill not to see how it might benefit us but to ascertain which side of the divide it comes from. In 1948, Mohandas Ghandi was killed by a fellow Hindu because he was committed to bridging the gap between Muslims and Hindus.

Despite the powers that try to keep us separated from one another, from seeing what we share in common, I read stories every day about people who are spanning the differences, reaching out to others instead of building walls. It is these stories I want to tell. The inertia may simply be my own lack of discipline. I say this because I don’t want to sound paranoid or flaky, as if what I might post here is so important that the forces of darkness oppose me. Nevertheless, there is plenty of evidence that, with apologies to Mr. Frost, “Something there is that doesn’t love” a bridge.

Struggle for the Soul of a New Generation

Before the August 1 issue of Rolling Stone even hit the newsstands, NPR did a piece on the firestorm surrounding is cover. The controversy wasn't over the feature article entitled "Jahar's World", an in-depth profile of the surviving alleged Boston bomber. It was about the image on the cover--a handsome, tousle-headed youth. People were saying that not only the photo but its placement on RollingStone's cover made the kid, referred to as a monster in the article, look like a rock star. New England-based Tedeschi Food Stores had already announced that it would not carry the issue.

            The article itself, based on numerous interviews with people who knew Tsarnaev, including fellow students from his high school in Cambridge, MA, is a thorough study of how such a well liked, successful student, who seemed to fit right into his American community, went so horribly wrong. Janet Reitman traces the Chechen immigrant’s devolvement and recruitment into Muslim extremism by his older brother, his partner in the bombing. Although there were some telltale signs that Jahar was becoming militantly anti-American, the changes mostly slipped under the radar or were ignored when they surfaced. There were family problems—isolation, the parents’ failure to succeed economically in the US and returning to Chechnya, Jahar staying behind with his brother Tamerlan, who was being drawn deeper and deeper into a fundamentalist community. 

            The Rolling Stone article examines how religious and political extremists can recruit a young person by playing on his loneliness and longing for a home he has never really known. Aside from the cover glamorizing a young terrorist, the article fails to take the most crucial step and look at solutions to a growing international problem. Enter Eboo Patel, a Bridge Person if ever there was one. Patel, the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a

Generation (Beacon Press, 2007) begins his book with tales into which Jahar’s story would fit only too well. Patel tells how Christian, Jewish and Muslim extremists have all reached out to disaffected youth, recruiting them to commit acts of terror around the world. He goes on to challenge the pluralists among us, asking what we are doing to reach out with a different message.

Patel also tells about his own difficult search for identity as a young Muslim growing up in America. Unlike Jahar, Patel’s parents, Indian immigrants, enjoyed economic success in the US. Despite that, he was at one point drawn, not to Muslim extremists but to the neighborhood bad boys, “the boys who ride dirt bikes,” as his mother referred to them. What saved him, Patel says, is his parents’ insistence that he continue his association with the YMCA. There, engagement in community service kept him, as he gradually returned to the Muslim roots he had left, from extremism. It was through community service that he learned what he had in common with Americans from diverse backgrounds.

And it is interfaith community service that is at the heart of the organization he cofounded, Interfaith YouthCore (IFYC). In IFYC young people, particularly college students (and it was as he began college that Jahar was led into his diabolical act), engage in community service activities with youths of many faiths and backgrounds. Besides serving together, they talk and learn about what they have in common. They build bridges among themselves and others. Eboo Patel’s core belief is that “religion is a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division.” If those of us who are cultural and religious pluralists are to save our world from extremist disasters, we must be as active as the extremists in recruiting youth to opportunities in which they can experience their commonalities and learn to respect their differences.

Take a quiz to find out how much you know about interfaith cooperation in diverse ethical and religious traditions. For example, do you know which U.S. President, while addressing a Jewish community and affirming America’s commitment to interfaith cooperation, insisted that “the Government of the United States…gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance”?