Sunday, July 29, 2007

GOOAALL - Part II: Iraq Wins!

Iraq has won the Asian Cup for the first time, beating Saudi Arabia 1-0!

Ali Adeeb of the Times Baghdad Bureau writes:

Baghdad celebrates

Iraqis in different neighborhoods in Baghdad took to the streets cheering and shouting, “Play play Iraq!” and “Stay victorious Baghdad!” after the Iraqi team won the Asian cup today.

In Sadr city people of all ages poured into the streets, walking and driving cars despite the vehicle ban, waving Iraqi flags and singing in joy. People were seen in the streets distributing sweets and soft drinks to the celebrating crowds.

Abu Baqir, one of the celebrating men, said: “Congratulations to everybody. This is the greatest sign of Iraqi unity. Congratulations to all Iraqis. You can see the national feeling, it has always been there, and we hope this winning will be the beginning of the end of sectarianism. This team includes Shiite, Sunnis and Kurds, it is a team of all Iraqis.”

He added: “I swear if it was secure enough we would celebrate for three consecutive days”.

You can read more of this, and other coverage at:
http://goal.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/the-celebration-in-baghdad/#more-137

Friday, July 27, 2007

"GOOAALL!!!": Soccer in Life and Metaphor

So I'm starting a new soccer team. This is the first time in a long time that I have gone two consecutive seasons without being on a team. There are lots of other things I do for fun and to keep fit, but soccer is something special.

Being the super-dork that I am, I not only like to play soccer - but to watch it, to read about it, and to think much too deeply about it as a metaphor for all sorts of things. Soccer as poetry!

Before I get into what I really want to write about this morning, let me highlight a couple exceptional examples of the kind of soccer writing that I find so compelling. It is writing that makes soccer overflow the pitch, explaining, celebrating and mourning everything from nationalisim to globalization to the mysteries of life itself.

See, I'm not the only super-dork soccer fan! We are (apparently) legion, and some of us even write books - which other super-dorks (like me) pay for and read with all too much fervor!

1. My favorite: "How Soccer Explains the World: an unlikely theory of globalization" by Franklin Foer. Foer wanders the world looking at the ways in which soccer shapes and is shaped by culture, politics and the new economic realities of globalization. The book is funny, infectious, smart and ultimately hopeful. A fascinating read for football fans and non-fans alike. The section on the role of football hooligans in the Rwandan genocide is particularly chilling and important.

2. "Soccer Against the Enemy: How the World's Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power" by Simon Kuper. In 1992, Kuper set out to travel the world, looking for case studies to support the thesis in this book's subtitle. He found a former East German who'd been hounded by the Stasi for his love of a West German team, a Slovakian president who made a nationalist statement with troops and truncheons in a soccer stadium, a Ukrainian club that exported nuclear missile parts, and much more.

3. And on a lighter note... "Soccer in Sun and Shadow" by Eduardo Galleano. Uruguayan poet and writer Eduardo Galleano writes about soccer as game, as metaphor as cultural phenomenon, as muse and as lover (sometimes spurned). His writing is lyrical, evocative and beautiful. A lovely book that will make you want to love soccer the way Galleano does.

But now to my main point. Having soccer on the brain lately, I have been following the trials and tribulations of the Iraqi national soccer team wiuth considerable interest. They have just made it to the finals of the Asian Cup, and international tournement where they have played the role of underdog better than any movie script could have dictated.

The New York Times has been covering the team, and has published two very good articles this week. They can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/world/middleeast/21soccer.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

and here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/26/world/middleeast/26iraq.html

In the first article, "For Iraq, Common Ground Can Be Found on Soccer Field", we read about how the Iraq remains "soccer crazy, and despite mortars, bombings and shootings that are sometimes aimed at amateur teams in Baghdad and Ramadi in western Iraq, it remains the national game. While the young play, older men and children gather to watch and women who are walking by steal glances from under their long, black veils."

The Iraqi soccer team, unlike any remaining Iraqi institution is non-sectarian. Players and coaches are Sunni, Shiite and Kurd, and the fact that they play and succeed as a team is powerfully inspiring as the rest of Iraq continues to spiral into a sectarian bloodbath.

"For Iraqis the success of the soccer team — a 22-member squad with Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds — evokes the old days, a time before sectarianism began to tear the country apart. It offers a moment of national pride and fosters the hope that the country, like the team, can look beyond its differences.

“The Iraqi team is the only thing that is uniting us now,” said Haiydar Adnan, 29, a Shiite. “When the Iraqi team wins a game, the people in Karkh, who are Sunnis, get happy, the people in Rusafa, who are Shiites, get happy.”

“I hope that the Iraqi politicians would look at these simple football players who managed to unite the Iraqi people and learn from them,” Mr. Adnan said.

Not only does the team bring together ethnic and sectarian groups (under a Brazilian coach), it is also free of the abuse that sports teams suffered under a son of President Saddam Hussein, Uday, who was the head of the soccer federation. That is another encouragement to Iraqis that they can win out of skill, and not out of fear."

So I was feeling all good and sunshiney for a day or two there, which is tough when it comes to Iraq. But hey, I thought, any silver lining is still a silver lining, right?

But I (not to mention the Iraqi people) was quickly brought back down to earth. I guess I saw it coming, but the next headline, "Soccer Victory Lifts Iraqis: Bombs Kill 50" was as heartbreaking as ever.

"As the Iraqi national soccer team eked out a 4-3 shootout victory over South Korea on Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis poured into the streets in a paroxysm of good feeling and unity not seen in years.

It was more rapture than celebration, a singular release of the sort of emotion that has fueled so much rage and fear and paranoia. But this evening, at least at first, it seemed diverted into nonstop car-horn bliss; spontaneous parades clogged streets from Erbil to Karbala, from Basra to Mosul, from Ramadi to Baghdad.

Then, just as suddenly, the moment passed in places, and the fractured Iraq re-emerged. As throngs of people danced and shouted in Baghdad, insurgents took quick advantage of the unguarded revelry. Two suicide car bombs ripped through cheering crowds in Mansour, on the western side of Baghdad, and in Ghadir, on the city’s eastern side. Together they killed at least 50 people and wounded 135 more, according to an Interior Ministry official."

Tellingly, not even the suicide attacks have been able to entirely dampen the spirits of Iraqi soccer fans who finally have something to cheer about, something to be hopeful about - even if it is only the largely symbolic victories of a team playing a soccer match thousands of miles away. The celebration goes on, as life and love always does - terror or no terror.

Which brings me to my new idea. This new team of ours needs to have two different jerseys, one white and one colored. I found a website (the Assyrian Market http://assyrianmarket.com/iraq-soccer-team-jersey.html) where we can order Iraqi jerseys. I can't speak for the whole team obviously, which hasn't even come together yet, but I have decided to wear a white Iraqi soccer jersey for all of our "white" games, in solidarity with the people of Iraq, who still laugh and play and cheer even as the war drags on and on.

I also encourage churches and other community groups to participate in the Passback Program. Passback collects gently used soccer equipment and redistributes it to people and places where it is needed - including Iraq. We did this last year at the First Unitarian Church of Denver and quickly collected enough equipment to outfit almost ten full teams, more than 100 players worth! If you are interested, please contact Courtney at cef@ussoccerfoundation.org or (202) 872-6659. The Passback website is: http://www.passback.org/

By the way, if you'd rather play soccer than read about it, and you happen to live somewhere near Denver, email me. We may just have a roster spot for you...

in peace, Aaron

Friday, July 20, 2007

Still struggling with race, violence, and hope...

Well, after my last post, I was looking forward to switching gears and writing about some of the other things on my mind these days - many of them vastly more fun than what I have been writing about so far. But what happened to Cornelius has stuck with me, and I don't think I'm done writing about it yet. I am still in a Bermuda-triangle of outrage and grief and frustration.

Since my last post, I have been reflecting a lot, and I think I have begun to understand one of the things that pains, baffles and infuriates me the most in all of this - the kind of "ordinariness" of violence and injustice. It certainly didn't/doesn't feel "ordinary" to me, yet as you will see in the letter below - the extraordinary savagery of racism (obviously all oppression is savage) can all too often be met with a kind of bland, normalizing indifference or passivity which, to me, amounts to nothing less than a re victimization, a further assault on the very humanity of people who are already suffering. The "banality of evil", Hannah Arendt called it...

Whether this brutal and complicitous normalization takes the form of hollowly "objective" statistics in a newspaper or in the bland stares of police called to respond to a beating - it is this dehumanization, this passive shrugging of the shoulders that drives me crazy. As much as I deplore the acts of physical and psychic violence themselves, at least I think I can understand them. What I cannot understand is what it is that makes so many of the rest of us stand around pretending that such acts are....normal.

The letter below is one I wrote to a colleague after my first real taste of this kind of normalization of evil. As you will read, one of my teammates was badly beaten during a "friendly" recreational soccer game. It took me almost a month to get the attacking players punished, and I found out, much later - that the team and offending players had actually not been banned at all, but merely transfered to another division with a new team name.

The cold eyes of the police, the (literally) powerless shoulder-shrugging of the referee, the oh-so-cautious legal mumbo-jumbo response of the league and the open glee of the attackers are all too perfectly representative of the ways in which the "banality of evil" actively conspires with and perpetuates oppression and violence - even in a friendly neighborhood soccer league.

I have changed the names of everyone involved to protect their privacy, but the text of the letter is unchanged.

Dear Madeline,

I have been meaning to write and catch you up for some time now, but the time-space continuum seems even dicey-er than usual this winter. First of all, I have accepted an offer to intern at First Unitarian in Denver. It was a difficult decision, and a bit surprising, considering that Denver had never been high on my list. An example of how my "wants" don't always match up with what's best for me. I talked with a number of wonderful churches, and am convinced I would have had a great experience at any of them - but the more deeply I reflected about what I wanted out of my internship Denver rose to the top.

I am particularly interested in churches that are at or near "threshold phases" in their lives - junctures in the life of a church when they must make choices about who they are and who they want to (or have to) become. How to lead/navigate congregations across thresholds of identity and mission is something I want to start learning as soon as possible, and I see it as a big part of my calling. Denver certainly appears to be such a church, and seems to be serious about riding the waves with intention. I have the sense that I will not only learn a lot there, but also be able to make some meaningful contributions to the congregation, which is important to me. And last, but certainly not least - Eliza loves Denver and can practice Chinese medicine there without any contortions.

So now that the decision is made I can finally return to my "regular" life, such as it is. I am scheduling my meeting with the MFC already...now if that isn't a reality check I don't know what is! Should happen in the spring of 2007. I'm also taking an incredible class at the U of C with Dwight Hopkins, "Third World Theologies", which you would love, I'm sure.

Despite the overall bright and hopeful arc of my life these days, I'm also dealing with some really horrible stuff. I don't know if I've mentioned this to you before, but I am captain/coach of a local co-ed soccer team. Last year the team was mostly seminarians, but a whole bunch of them went off to internship/graduation, and this year the team is made up of all sorts of people. We have players from England, Haiti, the Ukraine, Mexico and Central America. Great people, who want to stay in shape, make new friends and...just play.

Two weeks ago, toward the end of one of our games, players from the opposing team attacked our two players from Haiti. It started with some pushing and the next thing I knew one of our players, Robert, who is about 5'5", was curled up in a ball while the male players from the opposing team were stomping, hitting and kicking him. The other Haitian player, Martin, tried to help and was attacked too. It was the most savagely surreal thing I have ever seen. I ran over there as fast as I could yelling for them to stop. I grabbed one player in a bear hug (sure he was going to knock my block off) and pulled him off of Robert - but even as I did so I saw a couple other guys attack Martin (who was trying to get away) from behind with kicks and punches to the head. He never saw them coming.

I let go of the guy I was holding and tried to grab another, but the one I let go of just charged at poor Robert again. I managed to get my body between them and Robert and held the rest of them off until the referee got over his shock and tried to restore some order - but it was so scary...

Robert was hurt badly, and we called the police and ambulance. While we were waiting one of the opposing players came up to me, clapped me on the shoulder and said with a grin "It was a good battle, eh? Like no holds barred - you know - a good battle! Take no prisoners!"

The police were beyond horrible, the kind of thug-like cops you'd find in a Spike Lee movie. While the other team continued to taunt Robert and Martin, the police made it clear that they didn't care at all about justice - they clearly believed that the "black guys started it" - as the other team said. The police were menacing, radiating the same casual brutality as the other players were. One officer, a Hispanic guy, tried to argue with the other officers about how Robert had obviously been beaten - but they (the other officers) just teased him for being "soft" and then ignored him.

I can't begin to tell you what it was like. In some ways it was worse than the beating itself. I have never felt so powerless, just the terrible feeling that there was no hope of justice here - none. I suddenly realized that the feeling of wrenching anger and despair I felt was...probably par for the course for Martin and Robert and countless other people in Chicago and around the world. No wonder Robert refused to press charges - what's the point?

The paramedics couldn't patch Robert up, so he had to go to the hospital. He has no health insurance. He ended up with a mouth full of stitches that will have to stay in for a couple weeks at least. He also is still having trouble breathing from being kicked and stomped in the ribs.
I wrote a letter to the league and got the other team kicked out (I had to fight for that, believe it or not!) and permanently banned. Now there is a zero tolerance policy regarding unsportsmanlike conduct...but it all feels so pathetic and empty. I am encouraging Robert to sue and/or press charges, but so far he won't budge. He won't even talk about it - just preserving his tough guy act. At least they can't take that away from him.

We had our first game without them last week. We talked about just quitting altogether, but that seemed like and even greater loss. It was a good game, but the team is still jittery - as if the ghosts of the fight are still with us, if that makes any sense. I think it is likely to draw us closer together, but it's hard.

When I think about the ways we (UUs) talk and talk about our "anti-racism/anti-oppression" work...talk, talk, talk - a deep swell of frustration washes through me like ice water. What I saw (and was part of) was hate with no mask on. It was brutal and unthinking and uncommunicative - it was just savage. It is so clear to me that racism is just plain evil - it doesn't care about "I" statements or inclusive language or phrases like "multi-cultural compentance." It just wants to dominate and hurt, and if it gets cornered it will lie. It seems to me that when we allow our beliefs or our words (endless internal discussion) stand as proxy for action, we are doing nothing less than passively enabling racism, enabling the evil that left my friend's blood all over my hands and clothes - at a friendly Saturday morning soccer game!

I know that many people and many UUs are continuing to combat racism. I know that many of us do much more than talk - and I know that talk is necessary. But I still feel left with a painful question - how is what I am doing, and what we, collectively, are doing - making it less likely that Robert will ever get beat up again? How is what I am doing helping Robert (and god knows how many others) find justice with his mouth full of stitches? I guess that's my new personal measurement.

I hope you don't mind me venting like this. I really didn't mean to. I am still more upset about this than I thought. This was just supposed to be a quick update from Meadville. But the truth will out, I suppose.

Peace to you,

Aaron

Friday, July 6, 2007

Cornelius Lockhart was Murdered Last Night

Cornelius Lockhart was murdered last night.
Cornelius Lockhart was murdered last night.

I knew Cornelius as one of the custodians at Meadville Lombard Theological School, where I have spent much of the last three years.

When our sink was plugged, we called Cornelius. When our kitchen smelled like gas, we called Cornelius. When there were animals living in the walls, we called Cornelius.

This morning all I can think about is Cornelius.

I remember all the mornings we stood around shooting the breeze when I was in no hurry to get to class on a sweet spring morning. I remember the sound of his snow shovel scraping the paths, steps and sidewalks after a snowy night.

I remember moving chairs and cleaning up the Chapel with him after this or that function. All of those functions really run together for me now, but I remember the clanking of the metal chairs and synching up the last black garbage bag and saying “See you later. Have a good night.”

Cornelius was a good man, and I am not just saying that because he is dead. He was a thoroughly, twenty-four hour a day, all weather good guy. He was the kind of guy people liked to be around: warm smile, easy laugh and kind eyes.

And last night Cornelius was murdered.

Apparently, he was trying to break up a fight. One of the combatants went outside, got a knife – and stabbed him to death. Murdered him. Just like that.

Just like that?

Cornelius leaves behind a beautiful little girl, Amaya, a step-daughter, and his partner. Nothing can fill the hole that has been torn in their lives. I pray to whoever or whatever answers prayers that they may find some peace, some solace – and some justice – somehow, someday.

I don’t know if the Chicago newspapers will run a blurb about Cornelius’ death or not, but I have a sinking feeling that it will go something like this:

“Cornelius Lockhart, twenty-something-year old African American man, died of knife wounds following a late-night altercation on Chicago’s South Side. Cause of the altercation is unknown and police do not currently have any suspects.”

This is what all such blurbs say: at least when they are about African American men.

I was in Chicago a couple weeks ago for my graduation from seminary. That was the last time I saw Cornelius. My wife and I went to get a cup of coffee from the same place we had been getting our coffee the whole time we lived in Hyde Park. At the counter I noticed that my favorite “coffee guy” – who seemed to work a million hours a week – wasn’t there. Then my wife gasped and pointed at a photo on the counter, right in front of us. It was a Memorial: a photograph, dates of a too-short life, and a small cut out from the Chicago Tribune (which I cannot find now, online – so here is a blurb from the Chicago Maroon):

“Charles Carpenter, 38, was shot and killed Saturday night after an altercation on the 2500 block of East 79th Street. Carpenter is survived by his four children. Police are investigating the incident, but no arrests have been made. Services will be held on Tuesday, May 29, at Carter Temple Christian Methodist Episcopal Church at 7841 South Wabash Avenue. Services will immediately follow a viewing scheduled from 11 a.m. to noon.”

I felt sick. Not just at the loss of such a warm and good human being, someone who had made my life just a little bit sunnier – and not just because of the manner of his death, which no matter how common it becomes on Chicago’s South Side, never loses its horror – but because of how his death was reported. It seemed to reduce this unique and special human being to little more than a statistic, a footnote, one more young black man who died violently.

But that’s not who Charles Carpenter was. That’s not who Cornelius Lockhart was. They were people, children of God. They struggled and loved and lived and made plans for the future. They were good men. I did not know either of them particularly well, but I know this – they were a lot more than footnotes.

And what, exactly, is an “altercation”, anyway? I suspect that when many of us read the word “altercation” in the same sentence with “African American man” – the word conjures up a specific set of stereotypical images; images fed to us in one way or another for hundreds of years – but perhaps never so graphically and pervasively as today. In this case, the blurb does not refer directly to Charles’ race – but it does so indirectly – “the 2500 block of East 79th Street.” A kind of geographical shorthand that someone learns pretty quickly in Chicago.

Can “altercation” possibly encompass the end of someone’s life? Can “survived by his four children” possibly do justice to the breathtakingly beautiful bonds of love that have been twisted and torn?

I don’t think so. But I am quite sure that if I, a middle class white man, died of knife or gunshot wounds, no newspaper would simply say that I had died following an “altercation.”

When I first moved to Hyde Park, someone told me that the University of Chicago has the second largest police force in the State of Illinois. Which is not suprising. Hyde Park is an island, a bubble surrounded by the rest of Chicago’s South Side; a bubble in which, on any given day, you can overhear brilliant and privileged people discussing the finer points of Fourteenth Century Italian poetry or the effect of German Pietism on the Radical Reformation.

The University police make this possible, defending the safety and property of those privileged few (including me) from all the dangers that lurk (real and imagined) just a few blocks away. Only because of this nearly invisible cordon can we believe, even for a moment – that Fourteenth Century poetry is critical subject of discussion and (often heated) debate on a fine spring morning in a world such as this.

I am as guilty as anyone.

My time in Chicago was made immeasurably better by Cornelius. I liked him a lot and remain deeply grateful for all he has done for me – but why did it never occur to me that at night, when all the work was done, I stayed there in Hyde Park, protected by my skin, my class and the invisible force field of the police – while Cornelius, also because of his skin and his class – went…somewhere else?

I have no idea where or how Cornelius lived when he wasn’t at work. But I bet it was different then where I did, and do – and always will.

I feel especially sick about this today, as I think about how many sermons and prayers and theological arguments I have aimed at the interlocking evils of racism, classism and all kinds of other “isms.” How short they fall – how pallid they seem to me right now – written by a white guy from the safety of office or living room for audiences made up of other (mostly) white, privileged folks to read or listen to in the comfortable safety of churches and living rooms.

There isn’t a sermon here for me today, or a prayer, or an academic analysis – much less a call to action. Maybe there will be tomorrow, or the next day – but for now there is just grief.
My heart and my prayers go out to your family, Cornelius, and to yours, Charles, and to all those who love you and are hurting right now. My heart and my prayers, for whatever they are worth, go out to all you whose names I know and whose names I don’t know; to all you unique, special, and irreplaceable people whose lives are recorded and reduced by the detached prose of back-page newsprint.

Amen.