November 22nd, 2015

As I start to run low on reflections and insights from the past year, I will expand my focus to include current events and my thoughts thereon. Yes, this blog will still be about cancer, and the changed perspective on life it has given me. For one, anything I say or write or think will forever be marked by cancer's influence. But more specifically, I will still incorporate my memories and experiences with cancer here, and I will strive to find ways to use examples from this past year to support whatever I might be writing about here. The lessons I have learned and the experiences I have been through do not, I sincerely hope, pertain only to cancer. With that in mind, let's talk about refugees, and a bit about cancer.

I cannot continue to hold my tongue about Syria and the people fleeing that country. I have seen too many hateful, xenophobic, self-centered comments and opinions on the news and in my facebook feed to ignore. My desire for this blog is, ultimately, to voice my opinion about life and to share whatever wisdom I have to offer, or at least my attempts at being wise. Further, I hope to do all this in the name of furthering God's Kingdom here on earth, which in my mind primarily involves spreading God's love. So, to ignore a troubling amount of ignorance and hatred around me about any issue would be, I think irresponsible, and would keep this blog from living up to its potential. I don't delude myself into thinking I'll change anyone's mind here. I don't know if anything online can do that, after all. From what I can tell, just about anything online tends to breed polarization, rather than help uncover common ground. But I'll give this a try anyways.

At the Ronald McDonald House, and at the pediatric day hospital, I encountered numerous families from across the globe, who came to New York City with one goal in mind: to get the best possible care for their child.  As I see it, the situation regarding people fleeing Syria is no different. These are people who are doing whatever they can to just survive, much less to give their families, their children, a better life. The United States is a land of relative safety and stability, a nation founded in part on the idea that this should be a country of freedom and opportunity for all. Just like our hospitals, some of which are the very best in the world, are open and available for the rest of the world to come to for treatment, so too should this country be open to those who would seek refuge here.

I'm going to take a moment here to respond to one argument I've seen all too often. Many try to reason that we have too many problems here already without adding a bunch more people who need help. There are to many people here without homes, too many veterans receiving too little care, to take on the burden of helping more people, especially people from some other country. And yes, we spend too much on war, and not enough on caring for the people who fought those wars. There are too many people struggling with their housing situation in this land. But that doesn't mean we can't welcome those who need somewhere to go.

To say we cannot help others until we have solved all our problems is an extraordinarily troubling suggestion. By the same logic, we should turn away every desperate family from outside the country hoping against hope for effective treatment for their child's cancer, until every American is healed of whatever ails them. Following that argument, we might conclude that we can't research AIDS treatments until we have cured cancer. Or vice versa. Either one is ludicrous.  I hope everyone can agree that such decisions would be unethical by any reasonable moral standards. If you happen to have the best hospital in the world, you let the world go there for treatment. End of story. Likewise, if you have a stable, relatively safe country, you don't turn away people who want desperately to escape violence. You let them come. End of story. Maybe.

Now, I truly am not here to argue for any course of action on behalf of our government officials here in the United States. They have intelligence (to be clear, I mean information) that I do not, and as such they hopefully understand the situation far better than I do. They must weigh pros and cons from a perspective of national security and what is best for the country, while balancing that with their understanding of the proper role of the U.S. in the world. I understand that perhaps the proper response for the U.S. government may not be *gasp* synonymous with the most Christ-like response, whatever that may be. Perhaps the U.S. should not allow any refugees from Syria to come into the country, in an effort to avoid a terrorist attack here.

Or perhaps we should welcome everyone with open arms, and place a higher priority on our moral duty to our fellow humans, and on our self-proclaimed role as a leader of the free world than on maintaining artificial boundaries. Perhaps we should stop viewing the lives of U.S. citizens as more important than the lives of those fleeing warfare in their home country, wherever that may be. Ultimately, I cannot pretend I have a perfect answer for how the U.S. government should respond. I know what I'd like, and what I think is best, but I don't know that I'm qualified or informed enough to act like I have a perfect solution to the problem. Well, actually I know I'm not. So while I'm not going to say "our government must follow this course of action," I do have some  strong beliefs about how I personally must respond, and how I'd like to see the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, respond.

To me, as someone who tries to follow Christ's example, there is only one clear response to this situation that I can, in good conscience, support. Let them come. We must help them out as best as we are able. Jesus, who is, as far as I'm aware, the model for the Christian life, spoke a few times that I can recall off the top of my head about helping other people. He also backed his words up with actions. I don't recall any parable of "the righteous man who turned away someone in need" though. I can't remember any Sunday School stories where a man who was paralyzed had his friends lower him through a roof so he could see Jesus, only to have Jesus berate him for ruining the roof and yelling at his friends to pull him back up and send him on his way, back to wherever he came from.

I can think of a handful of relevant parables though, most obviously that of the Good Samaritan, that, to me, allow no room for any response but that of love and compassion for all other human beings. The Good Samaritan is an impressive story for several reasons. It is not the people we think it should be, who help the robbed and beaten man. It is, in fact, someone from a marginalized people group, someone who has been looked down on his entire life by the mainstream Jews of the day. This "Good Samaritan" helped someone from a people group that likely would never have helped him. He even paid with his own money to ensure that the robbed and beaten man received the care he needed. It made very little sense, in other words, from a practical perspective.

Yet Jesus told this story, with these carefully chosen details, and said it was an example of how to act, of how to love others. To me, then, it matters little if Daesh (ISIS) extremists may be sneaking in occasionally with the actual refugees from the horrific violence in Syria. It doesn't matter if there is a chance that by letting any and all Syrian refugees seek shelter here, we may also let in a few extremists with violent intent. Whether they would help or hurt us, love or hate us, we are to love them. And we definitely, definitely cannot risk being unloving to the victims of violence, for the sake of hating our enemies. So however you think the U.S. government should respond to this ongoing situation, consider what it means to follow Christ's teachings and examples, and ponder on what it means to love your neighbor. Friends and enemies alike.