Blind or Bold?

When I was a junior in High School I was in an English class that was centered on classroom discussion about “big questions”. While I don’t think that that was the original intent of my teacher at the time, he had a tendency of digressing to the exact place where we would learn the most. Yes, we learned about English, literature, and writing styles, but ultimately we learned about life. He gave us the space that we needed to start to figure out who we were, and who we wanted to be.

One of our class discussions escalated quickly into a debate about politics—war specifically. A fellow peer of mine, a classic small-town patriotic conservative, boldly declared that we are in God’s country so we need to go to war and we will prevail, because God is on our side.

My teacher responded by saying that every country declares that God is on their side—that they are God’s country.

I wasn’t a Christian then, and summed up my teacher’s words to merely being a “devils-advocate” stance, playing the side of opposition to get us to think bigger and ask questions that challenged our comfort zone. It wasn’t until my past couple of years being a Christian that I have really thought about his words. They were not a bash against my beliefs, nor were they a bash against our country; they were an explicit challenging of our ethnocentric predispositions.

Regardless of where you stand, your view of the world is entirely different from another’s, and acknowledging such a statement to be true will not just challenge your understanding of the world, but it will challenge every single binary paradigm you have structured your life around. If “black/white, wrong/right, yes/no, war/peace, winning/losing, for/against, ally/enemy, us/them” are not definitive mutually exclusive dichotomies then where does that leave us?

Or better yet, if those mutually exclusive dichotomies are not as clear cut and reliable as we treat them, then how does the way we live our lives affect others around us? If we treat every person that is “too different” from us as an enemy, as wrong, as a reason for war, then where does that leave our world?

In Mohsin Hamid’s novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, we are introduced to a character, Changez, who grew up in Pakistan and moved to the United States for higher education, and ultimately for a level playing field where he could fairly pursue the American Dream. Changez excels in school, athleticism, and even manages to land a high-paying job with a financial firm. Changez loves America. However, when 9-11 happens, other’s perception of him drastically becomes far worse than ever before. While before he encountered racial micro-aggressions, he still had a chance at chasing after the American Dream he wanted. But after 9-11, with fear and chaos so heavily in the air, Changez was treated as an enemy—as a terrorist.

One of the most controversial parts of Hamid’s novel is when Changez watched the twin towers fall to the ground. This is because when Changez sees the towers fall to the ground he smiles.

Instantly, any American reader who was old enough to remember the horrific monstrosity of 9-11 cringes with disgust. They feel nauseated at the idea that any human being would smile at the witnessing of that event, nonetheless the concept of an author writing such a thing in his fiction book. Why would an author choose to create such a devious beast? Thousands of people died. Thousands of families lost their loved ones. Billions of people were stricken with fear and grief from having to witness such an attack occur on their home territory. Why would an author be so insensitive?

Or, is the author trying to show us something about ourselves through our own initial gut-reaction? Is Hamid trying to somehow force us as readers to address that same statement my teacher told me five years ago—“every country declares that God is on their side—that they are God’s country”.

What happened on that September 11th was nothing short of a nightmare come true. It was a monstrosity that cast a boulder so large into our waters that we are still feeling the ripples of it. But what if we were in Changez’s shoes? What if we were immigrants from another country, trying to succeed in America, yet despite the freedom that we heard about we never fully feel accepted by America. People look at us differently, like we don’t belong, always a little skeptical of our intentions. We just want to thrive in this new land. We try harder than we ever have before and succeed in all the ways we can, yet no matter how much we assimilate, we can’t hide that we are from somewhere else, and because of our inability to hide our roots, we are never fully welcomed in. Then we witness the country in turmoil. Some extremists from our homeland attacked the land we have been striving to belong in. We feel torn. We don’t agree with those extremists, we don’t support them in any way shape or form. Yet, we watch the land we have been trying so hard to blend in with, the land that we love yet never are fully embraced by, crumble to the ground. How do we respond initially? How do we respond long-term? How do we empathize and grieve a loss that we don’t fully understand, yet a loss that we know all too well because our third-world country is always in a state of turmoil and survival?

It’s not as clear-cut when we think outside of our own shoes—when we take a moment to climb out of our ethnocentric tendencies to look through a larger scope. Changez’s smile shifts from being proof of his opposition and confirmation of his threat, to an initial response to a complex situation—an example of how being displaced can show us how inaccurate binaries often are.

I’m not advocating for tossing all of our binaries out the window and adopting an “everyone has their own truth” and “everything is subjective” mentality. What I am advocating for is that we don’t merely settle for believing that all situations are black and white. If we really want to seek wholeness and restoration—what’s “right”—then we need to be willing to think outside of ourselves, look through a larger scope, and see that more often than not life is complicated. Are we willing to take the time and energy it takes to navigate this complex world in a complex way? Are we willing to reassess our predisposed beliefs for the sake of seeking truth? Are we willing to humble ourselves and look at our own faults if in doing so we can bring unity where there’s been none and find immensely more than individual prosperity, but holistic restoration?