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Dad, Why Can’t We Just Kill Them?

Dad, Why Can’t We Just Kill Them?

Last updated on: December 2, 2015 at 7:59 pm by Christian Piatt

Dad, Why Can’t We Just Kill Them? 2015-12-02T19:59:12+00:00 Christian Piatt

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Read my follow-up piece written the next day about ISIS HERE.

My twelve-year-old son posed this question to me over the long weekend after hearing, the public radio accounts Assad’s iron grip in Syria, Israeli-Palestinian intractability and ISIS reaching their tendrils across the Middle East. His solution: just kill the bad guys.

This was, I explained, the response of a good contingency of Americans. In fact, there’s an entire political party that embraces this as an international philosophy. The NRA’s solution to bad guys with guns is more good guys with guns. So his “fix” was good company.

But it’s not mine.

“Who are the bad guys?” I asked.

“You know,” he said, “the ones who kill people.”

“But if we kill them, why aren’t we bad guys?”

“Because killing bad guys is a good thing right?” But I could see his wheels turning.

“They think we’re the bad guys, buddy.”

“What?” he was incredulous. “But we haven’t done anything.”

“Oh, we’ve done our share,” I said. “It’s all really complicated. Let’s take Israel and Palestine as an example. Most people in Palestine are Muslim, and most folks in Israel are Jewish. But they both have land and landmarks in the West Bank that they believe are very special, sacred.”

“So give the Muslim parts to Palestine and the Jewish Parts to Israel,” he shrugged.

“A lot of them are the same sites,” I said. Oh, and there are Christians in both Israel and Palestine. And they believe a lot of the very same sites are holy.”

“Hmm,” he scowled. “Maybe they should just share them?”

“Ideally I think that’s great,” I said, “but some people in that area feel like hey were there for a long time before Israel existed. So they think that their land and landmarks were taken from them.”

“That’s not cool,” he said.

“But without Israel, the Jewish people have no country of their own. They’ve been persecuted in so many places. They’ve been enslaved, displaced, moved around for thousands of years.”

“Oh, like in the Bible,” he said, “right.”

“And don’t forget the Christians,” I said. “Oh, and within the Muslim cultures, there are Shia and Sunni Muslims, and they don’t get along too well sometimes.”

“Geez,” he sighed, “this really is complicated. So what do we do?”
“We’ve been trying to figure that out for a long, long time, bud,” I said. “but here’s the thing. We’ve gone in and kicked out rulers we thought were bad, like in Iraq. But then the Shia and Sunnis don’t have anyone clamping down to keep them from fighting. And some people don’t think it’s our job to make them stop. Those wars between them have been around so much longer than we’ve even been a country.”

“So why are we even there?”

“Well,” I said, “it’s hard to stand around and do nothing when a leader is killing people and taking away their rights to live their own lives. But we go in and kill the bad leader and other problems come up. Another dictator takes over (see: Libya, Iran) or the tribal wars flare up (see: Iraq). Either way, people still keep fighting and dying.”

“That’s really sad,” he looked at his feet.”

“Yeah,” I sighed, “it’s really sad.”

There are glimmers of hope, like when Muslims and Jews develop schools where children of both faiths learn and grow up together. It’s a shift that, if it has any chance, likely will require generations to take root. And there are so many factors along the way that could derail the good work that has been done.

And yet the very act of trying is, itself, a sign of hope.

Sometimes hope is all we have to help us move forward. Sometimes it’s the only context in which the current brokenness and spilled blood seems surmountable. It’s why the Lord’s Prayer is so much more than the words themselves; we have to consider the despair of the reality in which Jesus offered such words to really begin to understand their potency.

It’s not here, not now. But maybe…

For the first week of Advent, my wife, Amy, preached about hope. She pointed out that having hope doesn’t mean necessarily that we see a way out of suffering; it does, however, give us a reason to try to keep working through it. We have to believe there’s another side to it. Another possibility. The potential for a new reality.

And that reality will never, ever be realized by responding to violence with more violence. It may make us feel better in the moment. It may seem to offer short-term relief. But ultimately, it makes everyone that participates become a little bit of what they hate. And the cycle continues.

Which story will we choose to try to live into?

Christian Piatt is the creator and editor of BANNED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE BIBLE and BANNED QUESTIONS ABOUT JESUS. He has a memoir on faith, family and parenting called PREGMANCY: A Dad, a Little Dude and a Due Date, and Hachette published his first hardcover book, “postChristian: What’s left? Can we fix it? Do we care?” in 2014. His first novel, “Blood Doctrine,” has been optioned by a Hollywood production company for a possible TV series.

Christian is the cofounder and cohost of the Homebrewed CultureCast, a podcast about popular culture, current events and spirituality that has a weekly audience of 25,000 people.

Preorder Christian’s next book, “Not That Kind of Christian: Loving God without being an a**hole,” HERE.

For more information about Christian, visit www.christianpiatt.com, or find him on Twitter (www.twitter.com/christianpiatt) or Facebook.

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