“Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious,
you're not really losing it. You're
just passing it on to someone else.”
- Albom, M
The five people you
meet in heaven
“Jalale (Jaw-law-lee)
means love,” she said when I asked her what her name represented.
We had just made introductions after 30
minutes or so of conversation on the flight.
It happens like that, you know.
You don’t always find a door, but when you do and it opens, it is not
often that it goes unrewarded. As
strange as it seems, asking one’s name usually comes almost as an
afterthought. “What a nice
conversation…by the way, my name is Ted.”
The
contrast…
Jalale was Ethiopian and my seatmate from
Philadelphia to Chicago. From there she would head to Portland for the wedding
of a cousin, and I to San Diego. She was
Ethiopian with that lilting East African accent and pleasant demeanor that made
our time together agreeable and engaging.
She was a nurse and had lived in this country for about 15 years. I asked her how she came to the United States
and a little about her country.
She explained some of the political problems
in Ethiopia were due to tribal rivalry – or better said – tribal
competition. This is not friendly, as
the word competition might suggest, but rather brutal government in the hands
of the tribe in power.
The Tigre tribe runs the current government
she said, and discriminates against the other tribes with impunity. The Amhara had been in power before and it
was the same then…the strong oppressing the weak – their own countrymen. Any civil uprising was put down with heartless
tactics.
Something
old, little new…
This is commonplace in human history as
evidenced by Chinese Clans struggling for power and control, or European
Families who fought for domination of the continent; more recently Cambodia or
Rwanda…this story has played and replayed from biblical Cain and Able/Jacob and
Esau….brother against brother in inter and intra racial/cultural fighting for
little more than the elusive control of land, power and resources…short term
gain…long-term loss.
She was of the Oromo tribe, but spoke both
Amharic and Tigrigna. As an Oromo, AND a
woman she had managed a college degree in Biology before finally getting to the
United States and becoming a nurse.
Here, she said, people have no idea the way her life had been in
Ethiopia; she was thrilled and honored to be in this land with freedoms, for
her people, unheard of.
A
different way?
The conversation reminded me of the
American experience in the bloodiest time in America’s history…the Civil
War. There is little way for any of us
to really understand the divisions amongst friends and family that was this
war. There is little way for any of us to understand the brutality and sheer
inhumanity that war represented. Yet it
happened, and on this continent.
The hard fought American experiment began
with the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in July of 1776, and was nearly
destroyed and consumed with the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. There are
many reasons why the Revolutionary War with Great Britain should have been
lost…there are many reasons why the civil war should have resulted in two
separate nations – through providence and the ‘Hand of God,’ neither occurred.
For four years the struggle is estimated to
have cost Northern forces 360,000 lives and the South 258,000. For both sides, the outcome of the war was
not clear, as both sides won and lost decisive battles. In was April in 1865, the War Between the
States found the beginning of its end.
In the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s home in Appomattox,
Virginia on April 9th, 1865 General Lee of the Confederates States
surrendered to General Grant of the Union forces. Petersburg had been lost, and Lee, now
trapped, knew there was no way for his army to survive. At this juncture, his men had forced marched
for several days with no rations and little water. Grant, anticipating Lee, had cut him off and boxed
him in. Lee would have to surrender or die.
Both men were West Point graduates before
the war and now fate had brought the two together on this April day. Grant had suggested leniency in earlier correspondence
with Lee, but Lee saw it as military strategy, NOT reality. Lee was concerned about the penalties that
would be imposed by this historic action. Would his men be executed for
treason, or worse paraded in northern cities in humiliation? Lee, considered by some to be one of the
great minds of military history, knew what became of vanquished armies. His sense of historical precedent fed his
anxiety.
Character
means everything…
Lee arrived early for the meeting, prepared
for humiliation. When Grant arrived, he laid
out terms for surrender. Grant’s
unrelenting style of battle provided little insight into what was to come. What actually came? Grant set historical precedent by showing
mercy to the conquered.
Grant fed Lee’s starving forces, and
released them to go home under the condition they turn in arms and
ammunition. Officers were permitted to
keep their side arms. Everything Lee’s
army had would be turned over to Grant’s forces and the men would agree not to
take up arms against the U.S. Government again.
There was no retribution…unheard of in warfare…Considering
the depth of feelings, and the devastating loss of life on both sides, the
following words by Jay Winik in his Civil War book, April 1865, are so poignant,
it is hard to imagine even the hardest hearts would not be moved:
“…on
this April day in 1865, there was…the formal sacking of arms and the last
somber folding of battle flags. Men were
not hanged, they were saluted; they were not jailed, they were honored; they
were not humiliated or beaten, they were embraced. Some of this was by design; much of it
occurred totally spontaneously. All of it mattered.”
“…[General]
Chamberlain [charged with implementing the surrender] suddenly gave the order
for Union soldiers to “carry arms” as a sign of their deepest mark of military
respect…All along the road, Union soldiers raised their muskets to their
shoulders, the salute of military respect….the veterans in blue [victorious
Union Army] gave a soldierly salute to those “vanquished heroes” – a “token of
respect from Americans to Americans.” ”
I had the Winik
book with me and thought Jalale might be interested in reading this
passage. I handed it to her and she read
the words…then she read them again making a soft sound. She glanced up and quietly said, “This would
never have happened in my country. I
cannot believe this to be true.” It
wasn’t that she didn’t believe it had happened, it simply did not fit in the
framework of life as she had experienced it.
As touched as I had been reading these words myself, I was more deeply
touched by her sense of awe that the victor would not destroy their enemy…this
was the American way.
War is brutal and
unfair and as ugly a reflection of the darker side of the human psyche as there
can be. We fight…we kill…and decades
later visit the battlefields as tourists.
Memorial Day for some is simply another holiday to get together for a
picnic and pay homage to those who have fallen…the pain of war either never
experienced or true loss felt.
There is a one
percent, however, a one percent of our population who have sacrificed for this
day, and a segment of that one percent who have given their lives for the
principle of freedom we experience with every single breath we take, even if we
don’t truly cherish it.
A grateful breath...
And, yet in this
moment, Memorial Day took a different and more richly felt gratitude for having
sat with this woman. For it reminded me,
that while we often complain about the ‘issues of the day’ – political, social,
religious, gender – they are all background noise to the commitment to the idea
of freedom, realized in this country like no other.
This country is the
first in history to be formed on an idea, rather than an agenda of power and
greed. To be sure, the founding fathers
and all those that have followed, had agendas for their lives, but when the chips
are down, we rise to understand it is the sacrifice of the few that protect the
rights of the many. It is this
principle, in the end, that makes the American experience bigger than our
individual and personal appetite.
The events in that
parlor in Appomattox, Virginia in the late spring of 1865, reminded me once
again of the gratitude I have to live in this country. It was also a metaphor for the way we should
live our lives.
For my fellow brethren who have served this great country in time of war, let us today remember this great American lesson and these words...
“…blessed are the
merciful, for they shall obtain mercy…”
- ted
