�UN envoy barred from Darfur camp, Insurgents used kids as cover then killed them, and Anger and cheers for immigration raids.�
News headlines haven’tbeen pleasant for decades now, probably because fear, death, and partisan politics sell extraordinarily well. It’s also due to our awareness of conflicts around the world. Issues we thought were only foreign problems are growing closer to our lives and we have to ask ourselves �how should we treat aliens, who is our neighbor, and what relation are they to us?�
By Stephan Puff,
Senior Staff Writer
�UN envoy barred from Darfur camp, Insurgents used kids as cover then killed them, and Anger and cheers for immigration raids.�
News headlines haven’tbeen pleasant for decades now, probably because fear, death, and partisan politics sell extraordinarily well. It’s also due to our awareness of conflicts around the world. Issues we thought were only foreign problems are growing closer to our lives and we have to ask ourselves �how should we treat aliens, who is our neighbor, and what relation are they to us?�
Modern conflicts all contain hostility toward what a nation or community deems as aliens. Aliens are people outside our sphere of experience. A rural, white, western, Christian male might regard a Muslim, a Hispanic, a French woman, or an urban citizen as aliens.
The order of the labels I use are not important, scramble up the example to an urban black Muslim female. The key factor remains that each person has an individual range of experiences that develops a concept of �us� and �them.�
A concept of universal equal treatment for all humanity ignores our human social structure. We experience ourselves and our community distinctly from aliens.
However recognizing that they are outside of our communal sphere, we have to form constructive ideologies for relation affirmation of their unique role in our lives.
Constructing a positive coexistence requires or necessitates archeological scrutiny.
The insights from millennia ago can provide enough reasons to rethink our treatment of aliens. We have to revisit what constructive methods past societies have used to see if they can apply today.
The Bible is held in a number of ways, as God’s word, a faithful response to God, or as an old history book. Still, in every passage there rings out the insights of our predecessors.
�When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt� Leviticus 19:33-34.
Let me rephrase that for modern times �…you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of (X).� (X) can be Europe, Asia, Mexico, America. Our ancestors were once all aliens somewhere.
Individuals, families and communities who have called one place, a piece of land, home might have lost an important insight. Shall we neglect and reject those seeking a new hope and a new life, because we ourselves are no longer repressed, because our citizenship and money is something they are not worthy of?
If we treat all aliens as trespassers we have neglected the past and rejected our duties of hospitality that spread good relations.
Still history doesn’thave straightforward answers to all our relational problems. Who
we see as aliens has been confused by global and local diversity. In historically more homogenous communities, like the Jewish tribes, an alien was anyone who doesn’tfit into the aforementioned categories of race, religion, and language, but in diverse countries these are not certainties we can fall back on.
People who were once aliens are now our neighbors, neighbors who don’talways speak the same language or share the same ethnicity or religion. Maintaining various beliefs, our neighbors don’talways fit our view of neighborly. But who are our neighbors then?
Iraq encloses three nations inside its borders and nobody there is going to call someone a neighbor who is willing to kill them. It’s troubling if we can’tcount on our neighbor to support us, much worse fearing they could kill us.
It’s a fear Americans have held toward immigrants and Mexicans since 9/11; they will steal our jobs, our standard of living, and terrorists will hop the border to kill us.
Americans, the French, Iraqis and numerous groups use outspoken patriotism (disguised nationalism) to prove a person worthy of neighborly values, but this showmanship patriotism only allows people to separate further from us as neighbors by being suspicious of those that are different.
Neighborly qualities are misjudged. Jesus prudently argues in the parable of the Good Samaritan, �Neighbors� are truly those who help us, aid us, and care for us. A Samaritan was seen as the religious scourge of the Jewish faith, yet was the only one offering compassion for a mugged Jewish man in a ditch.
We will always live around those that are not truly our �Neighbors�, but not because of differences, but because they don’tcare for us. Those who proclaim neighborly similarities but don’tdo neighborly duties are not our �Neighbors.�
So upon introspection of our relation to aliens and neighbors is the underlying message of our responsibility for humanity. Turning a blind eye or turning them away because of differences is actually us turning ourselves away, turning away our ancestors and responsbility.
Holding values of life, liberty, and justice for ourselves but denying them to others depreciates these values in our own lives, insights, and society.
View this writer’s profile.