Dear Friends,

Our Creator’s Grace be with you.

I am not anxious to write this letter, but I feel compelled. May our Creator’s grace be also with me in my attempt to reach out to you.

For many of you, the attacks Tuesday may represent a simple, straightforward, unmerited act of aggression. For example, from a family member, I received the following:

I think whoever organized this attack is going to be surprised by how quickly and strongly our country recovers. Yes, they destroyed a symbol in New York and damaged a symbol in Washington D.C. Yes, they were able to take advantage of the freedom that we have to hurt us. And yes, it is going to continue to hurt. But it isn’t going to stop us.

I just read a book about something called the "Red Ball Express" in Europe during the summer and fall of 1944. Several things stand out from this period. One is the ability and willingness of Americans to do a job that needs to be done, no matter what. Another is our ability to manufacture the physical supplies needed to accomplish a task, no matter what.

There is a concept/phrase/cliche/whatever that if something doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger. Individuals may have been killed yesterday, but the country was not.

Unfortunately, for me, the answers to Tuesdays attacks are not that straightforward. Yesterday I wrote my Mom and family the following:

My emotions are multiple and mixed. They include fear, but not fear of being here in Nicaragua. Some kind of awe at the fact that the World Trade Center no longer exists. Horror at the loss of life. Amazement at how the chickens of U.S. foreign policy have come home to roost. Horror at the use of the lives of innocent people for political statements. Outrage that the lives of the Iraqi civilians lost in the bombings by the U.S. and Europe have not been similarly mourned. And wonder about what it all means for the future.

I have put together some excerpts from communications I received since Tuesday that I am sending as a separate e-mail. I chose the excerpts intuitively, looking for words to express the confusion I am feeling. The observations of the individuals I quote in the accompanying e-mail, and many others that I did not excerpt, are helping me to sort through my whirlwind of thoughts. It is beginning to seem that I am going to have to live with the complexity of my thoughts and feelings, but, by the grace of God, apparently I am not alone.

But let me say some things that have been in my head, at the risk of alienating you, many of whom support the work I do with your donations:

I believe that as citizens of the United States, we are an oppressed and an oppressive nation. And I believe that we live with a violence that is constant and insidious and pervades nearly everything we think ourselves to be.

Let me try to show you what I’m trying to say:

Fluorocarbons—that old, boring story. Transparent gases pushing out antiperspirant, ripping apart the ozone year after year after year. The gas from the can I sprayed at my brother’s face in 1974 is still up there and will be for ten or fifteen years more, ravaging oxygen molecules that would have saved my nephew from the skin cancer he will have by the time he’s twenty-five.

More transparent gases. Sulfur emissions from our power plants, nitrous-oxide emissions from our cars, carbondioxide emissions from multiple sources, all working their invisible way into our atmosphere to begin their havoc—droughts, floods, acid rain, climate change. One visiting North American was commenting to me about a series of problems various plant species were suffering in California these days. How could it be, she wondered, that all of the eucalyptus are suddenly dying from insect attacks? And these other plants are suddenly dying from root rot? I nearly laughed. The plants are dying and all our children are growing up with asthma and we don’t get the connection. Invisible violence.

Nitrates from fertilizer use in the corn belt poisoning the water table, causing miscarriage after miscarriage in women who blame themselves for their "infertility." Horrendous birth defects from the pesticides and fungicides and nematicides used in grapes and other crops in California. Invisible violence, within our own country.

And our interactions with the rest of the world?

Thousands of glue addicts on the streets of Managua, addicted to the glue used to repair shoes and other leather products. The addictive ingredient is replaceable, but the profits are hard cold cash in the bank accounts of the stockholders in the States. The addicts, children as young as 10, are the offspring of the urban, invisible poor of Managua, the invisible capital of an invisible Third World country.

Do we know how many civilians died in Libya in 1999, during Clinton’s campaign to divert attention from his sex life? Or how many thousands of civilians dead in Baghdad in the 1991 from U.S. and European bombs, fighting for "petrol-acracy?" Hundreds died in the first George Bush’s "sanitary" extraction of Noriega in Panama City in the late 1980s. And what about Granada? Do we know how many died in Reagan’s invasion there in the mid-eighties?

Who were the dead? Were they ever mourned by us? We paid to have them killed.

Invisible, forgetable people from "somewhere else."

We export violence that is even more subtle. We in the north make how we live look so good. We are envied and emulated throughout the rest of the world to whatever extent possible, by whatever portion of the population that can control the resources it has to have to live like the "beautiful people" in the North. Our very lifestyles, and our greed are leading the world to an ugly and bitter end.

This is a horrible letter. But these are horrible times. Everyone agrees that the people who died in New York and in Washington must be mourned. Many of us might agree that we should make their deaths mean something, that they "should not have died in vain." The question of the day is: How do we do that? Where are we going to go from here?

My new friend in Haiti, Jeff Rogers, says "At its root, the gospel is very bad news before it can be good news; otherwise there is no good news at all. If the gospel ignored the realities of oppression in the world, the realities of Haiti [and New York and Washington, D.C and Baghdad and Granada and Panama and Managua], and of our own inadequacies it would be just another diversion from reality, like a silly game…. May Christ give us the courage to join with Him as He identifies with the desperate. May these present realities of poverty, oppression and our inadequacy be the vivid and sobering sacrament through which Christ’s broken body yields to the hope of our resurrected Lord."

God’s Peace.

Mark A. Hare
Mission Volunteer, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
Specialist in Environmental Education and Agroforestry

The 2001 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 251