Can a Whisper Drown a Shout?

We live in extraordinarily loud times, it seems. Everyone has some kind of megaphone, whether actual or virtual. If people aren’t holding physical megaphones on the streets of cities around the world, they are shouting at and through one another in the borderless, globe-crossing world of social media.

It would be lovely to imagine that what people are loudly exclaiming is some kind of call to human solidarity and goodness in the face of shared challenges. But it seems that too many of us have lost the ability to invest in or even imagine shared challenges.

In America, it feels like years since our national government has even tried to tackle serious problems. Border issues, health care costs, environmental degradation, and so on. A few bills have been passed, but it feels like we’ve lost the ability even to dream about what the future could look like, and instead we’re stuck in this place in which one side grabs a pile of stones to throw at the other. And vice versa.

While I don’t think legislative failures in America are equally apportioned between the two major parties, I do think the results are a sad commentary on what ought to be leadership in a nation — and in a world — desperately in need of both.

I have written elsewhere about the catastrophic stupidity surrounding responses to the latest crisis in the Middle East, with people so rooted to a cruel world view as to be unable to call out the brutal, inhumane rape and murder of young Israeli women by Hamas terrorists. Because they are young, Israeli women. Or equally appalling, to endorse and praise the kidnapping of elderly Israelis and even babies. The willingness of some folks to loudly and proudly justify such actions is a soul-crushing commentary on how low some portion of humanity has sunk. There is also the awfulness of those who refuse to see the suffering of Palestinian children and families as meriting deep concern. The merry-go-round goes on. And actual human beings suffer.

Which leads to what really bothers me. While stone-throwers and raging ideologues have their moment in the streets and on college campuses, does anything get better? Are lives saved, improved, nurtured, healed? Are wounds of body and spirit sutured? Shouldn’t this be our standard for the world all of us should want to live in? Isn’t our obligation to fill the many, many cracks in our world with something better, rather than trying to score some kind of victory over the “other side” to prove the rightness of our cause?

I have been putting up posters around my neighborhood of Israelis kidnapped into Gaza by Hamas. Many of them have been torn down or defaced. Instead of replacing them, which I had been doing, I decided to do something else. Now I just write on them “You are Loved” in red marker, with a drawn heart underneath. I don’t know how many of these hostages are even still alive, but I do this to offer something positive, something life-affirming, at a time when darkness and vitriol have become too common.

I would love to see that sentiment expressed more broadly, meaning on behalf of Palestinian civillians caught in a brutal war started and sought, tragically, by their own leaders in Gaza. Imagine a world in which we all joined together to spread a message of love for our own and for others, communicating something I would dearly hope we could all agree on: that each of us deserves to be loved, has the capacity to be loved, and can share love across boundaries of race, religion, ethnicity, geography, and gender. Maybe this simplest of gestures could drown out the loudness, the rage, the verbal gunshots that do nothing but drive us deeper into a darkness we must challenge at every turn.