ICONIC ELIE WIESEL: A LIFE OF CHARACTER AND GRACE COMES TO AN END

Elie Wiesel, 1928-2016

Once in a while, I am reminded of some words that I wrote in my private journal in February 1984.  "I am not given to finding heroes in men", I had written, "because no sooner had you made a hero of a man than he disappoint you with his negative ways of which it is hardly possible be proud".  That was consistent with the principle by which I had lived for much of my conscious life until that point, and definitely since then.  I have never had a strong longing to meet a famous person because I am less interested in associating with any man's fame than I am in the stories of their humanity and charity. Mr. Elie Wiesel had fame but it was his humanity that made him famous.  I could have wished to meet him and I would most definitely have loved to sit and hear him tell some of the stories of his life.  But I knew some things about his life because he gave so much of himself.                                             

Sometime in the early nineties, I came across the following words written and spoken by Elie Wiesel: “No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them”. Inspired, I cut the quote out of the New York Times, laminated and kept it in a permanent place in my home while I kept a copy in my office.  To this day, the cut-out quote remains in my home and office to remind me constantly of   the spirit and grace of a man who endured pain and still loved, and of my responsibility to always remember and remind others of the forces of love and hate that reside in the human mind, as well as the potentially destructive power of arrogance that lies within the human spirit.  For many years to come, I would refer to Mr. Wiesel's words in various lectures that I would give within and outside the United States.  

A Holocaust survivor, Mr. Wiesel chose love over hate, humility over arrogance, peace over war, forgiveness over grudge, and embrace over rejection.  He was a Nobel Peace Prize winner who understood the value of that honor but never rested on his laurels.  So he woke up everyday showing us by his words and deeds that he had a continuing responsibility to make this a better world, and to help us all to be more loving in our dealings with others.  He stood against all forms of discrimination and worked hard to ensure that people were defined as human rather than by their race, gender, sexual orientation or religion.  

While introducing President Obama in a ceremony at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Buchenwald, Germany on June 5, 2009, Mr. Wiesel said: "Mr. President, I have high hopes for you.  Be able, be compelled to change the world into a better place where people will stop waging war. Every war is absurd and meaningless.  We need a world where people will stop hating one another, where people hate the otherness of the other rather than respect it..."  At the age of 87, Mr. Wiesel died today without seeing that world, but he left the rest of us who continue to live after him to work with as much zest as we can muster to stamp out hate in our world.  Now I wish I had met him before he died.  I wish I had the opportunity to assure him that I am doing my part in the fight against hate and injustice.  I wish I could have told him that I would fight that fight until I breathe my last breath.  I loved him without knowing him personally and now I thank him posthumously for sharing his life's story in his quest to make this a better world in which humanity can be saved from itself.  I thank God for blessing this world with Elie Wiesel, knowing as I do that he was a rare gift to an ungrateful amnesic world that has so far learned very little, if anything, from the consequences of wickedness.

Today and always, Mr. Wiesel, rest in perfect peace.  Your work is done.  May your rest be eternally beautiful.

WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT

Like so many other Americans, I woke up early on Sunday, June 12th to a news alert about mass killings in Orlando, Florida.  I mourn with the families of the victims, although I did not know either the victims or any of the families.  In an underlying spiritual way, I can think of them as family and friends because I am conscious of the unfolding and unspoken experiences in the journey of my own human experience; a journey which only my Maker fully understands.  Therefore, as I approach the twilight of my human existence, I am increasingly reminded of my connectedness to others, even those that I might have felt the urge to abhor at certain points in my life. 

To say that I am frustrated by the frequent spate of murderous violence by gun-wielding haters in the United States would be an understatement.  Of course I am frustrated by the level of violence around the world and I have written about that reality in many countries, including the land of my birth, but that is not what this article is about.  Nor is it about the degree of my frustration, or even about me.  It is instead about the United States and our unwillingness to stem the tide of the spiral of violence in this country.

 

In a country where we emphasize our collective identity and our strongly held belief in choice, as well as its associated consequences, it is increasingly baffling to understand why incidents like this should not be considered within the context of our collective choice and consequences.  Incident after incident, President Obama addresses the country and begs our nation to support him in restricting access to assault weapons.  Each time, we reject his pleas and choose to allow deafening megaphones to be turned up against him from our homes, streets, churches and legislatures across our country - including our U.S. Congress.  We do that despite knowing that the next mass shooting is around the corner and the death toll might be higher than the one that just occurred.  The consequences of our collective choice are always the same: another incident of mass killings by assault weapons, then media lights that shine on the new city and the mourners for a week or so; and then we move on and forget.

As I have followed the news reports, it has been difficult to maintain a steady state of emotions without asking questions that I know I will ask again and again until we give up on our collective amnesia. How is it that an American can go into an American club and carry out such an assault on innocent people who did not know him and were not at war with him? Why is it that he would send them to their graves so prematurely just because he could?  How is it that in so short a time after the incident, supposedly religious people of faiths including mine were applauding the killings and trying to justify such a dastardly act through religious lenses that are warped at best?  How is it that we can go to bed and wake up every morning knowing that this too shall pass and also knowing that nothing will be done legislatively to stop the next mass gun killings? How is it that we can even think that emphasizing that the location of the mass murders was (is) a gay club makes it alright for one of us to go there and kill our brothers and sisters who God made in His own image - just like every one of us?  I am inclined to state the fact that Pulse wasn't just a gay club and that many of the victims were not even gay but what does that even matter?  How is it that we can avoid grieving as a nation when so much of the rest of the world recognizes the hurt and grieves over what has happened here? How is it that so many of us act as if the power of life and death is in our hands?  How is it that we can act and speak as if we have been granted the right to determine who belongs or does not belong in heaven?  How did our world get to this place where man now seems to believe that God was wrong when He said: "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy"?  Or that Paul was wrong when he said that if righteousness was based on the law, then Christ’s death was in vain.

In all of this, I have become convinced that our world's biggest and toughest blight is our hatred for others who do not fit the mold that we prescribe.  We argue over assault weapons despite knowing that their only purpose is to kill.  Yet, we must have them because we are so full of hatred toward others and we want to be able to kill them when we decide to.  We hate when we should love and we become arrogant when we should be humble and compassionate.  We judge when we shouldn't, then we hate even more.  In our judgment, arrogance and hatred, we diminish the value of others and fail to realize that God made them as they are.  So we refuse to accept that it is God’s choice (not ours) to have a place for His children in His mansion and that God will do that regardless of what we feel are their moral failings because morality is not righteousness and righteousness is not morality.

Today, tomorrow and every day for the foreseeable future, media lights will continue to shine on Orlando - until most of the murdered victims are buried, or until the next mass gun killings.  At this moment, I am concerned about what happens when the lights go out.  I am concerned because I know that this incident will again fade from our collective consciousness because that is what always happens.  When lights go out is when the true character of a person or society comes through.  On this fact, we have not been at our possible best as a society.  May I never forget Orlando, even when the lights go out.  

WHEN GOD HOLDS MY HAND......

I have just recently become older than I was exactly a year ago and, since I began to write this, I have even become older than I was when I awoke this morning. At my current age, I no longer accept the usual comment that "age is just a number".  Now I do not think of such a comment as fact but as consolation. If age was nothing more than a number, why do I now wake up sometimes to unexplained physical aches that I did not experience in the first five decades of my life? Why do people tell me that I don't look my age when they didn't say that to me 40 or even 30 years ago?  If age is just a number, why is it that I can no longer run as fast or jump as high as I did when I was a teenager?  Why then has proximity to the grave become much more real and closer to me than it ever did?  Why do I feel that I have so much to accomplish with so little time to do so?  Why is it now a stamp in my consciousness that at any time now the bell will toll for me? If age is just a number, why have I become more conscious of the fact that this is now legacy time for me when that was never in my thoughts previously?  Why is God teaching me things that He probably didn't think I needed to learn until now?  Please stop telling me that age is just a number because, to me, it isn't.

I know that my day of reckoning is closer now than it ever was and, although I know that I will not be the one to set the agenda for our conversation when I meet God face-to-face, I am thinking of the questions what I would like to discuss with Him when He holds my hand and welcomes me to heaven.  The more I think of my dream meeting with God, the more questions I have and the fewer the answers I have to situations that I had  long thought I was knowledgeable about.  Clearly, as I get older, I am not only thinking of my mortality but I am also looking at things differently and realizing how much I really desire to know about life and the world in which I have lived for as many decades as I now have.

If God grants me the opportunity, I would thank and then ask Him why he chose me for the blessings that he bestowed on me when I lived in this world. The truth is that if God had ever given me a pen and paper and asked me to script the life that I wanted to live when I was born, there is absolutely no way that I could have scripted it the way it came out.  I could never have even dreamed of the quantity and nature of blessings and miracles that God chose to pour into my life.  Certainly, this is not the life that I envisaged as a young man and it is only by favor greater than my human intellect and hard work that I am who and what I am.

I would ask God why He took my mother when I was only nine (and my youngest sister was only three years old) and why He took my father just shy of twenty years later - just as my youngest sister was writing her final examination as an undergraduate.  Then I would ask Him why He chose not to let my siblings and me drift as nomads and why He paved the way for us to become successful individuals. I would ask Him if He did that to fulfill His word that the children of the righteous would never beg for bread.

I would ask God why He felt that I deserved to be alive to see the first non-white person assume the high office of the President of the United States. Then I would thank Him for making it such that I was not only alive for that but was also here to see my children grow up and vote for a US President that looked like them.  Perhaps by the time I am having this conversation, I would also be able to thank Him for the opportunity to see a woman as President of the United States.

I would ask God why He made some people white and others black; why He made some gay and others straight; and why He allowed some to be rich and others poor.  I would ask Him if that was to test the ability of man to love others as much as God loves mankind.  I would report to Him that so many in the world that I just left have been hated and harmed by others just for being how God made them, and I would ask God if the hate in this world should ever be expected to end. I would beg God to raise people that would lead efforts to promote love in their communities because too many people who claim to be religious in the world are pushers of hate and violence against those who don't share their race/ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, gender, class, religious affiliation and/or political identity.  I would ask God why human beings believe that they must judge others over who and what they are when He who is the maker of us all has not judged His children but has instead said: "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy".

Finally, I would request God to keep His wall of protection around the family that I left behind on earth when He brought me to join Him in heaven.  I would ask Him to keep my children very close to Him every moment of their lives, to continue to reveal Himself to them according to His will and to maintain permanence in their hearts and lives because I desire to see them in heaven when they have lived their full lives here on earth.

THE INEVITABILITY OF CHANGE - BY PAUL INYANG

 

‎Paul Inyang‎, USA

 Some days I wake up and I see the “glass half-full”. It is not so easy for an “old” curmudgeon like me. We are like dinosaurs and ten...d to stay the course without much variance. We are almost always suspect of change—all its elements and underpinnings. Things are never what they say it is and we have seen it all before—at least that is what we think. But life is constantly moving despite all our misgivings and dragging us all along. It is the old story of a battered people who have lost their zest and have become cynical about every life circumstance. That is not my story today—for life is funny in its twist and turns. One can find themselves in what may seem like a quagmire but the way out may well be that we have to learn to smile about our life and remember that if we have lived long—we have seen it all probably. In every difficulty there is a lesson—one that we can readily see and those that we have to figure out with time. We just have to wait long enough and learn to laugh at ourselves.

It all reminds me of the recent budget situation in my homeland. The budget has been lost and found so many times that it has become hilariously delicious to read about. The characters that are emerging are just as funny as the story itself. The “budget mafia” and the bumbling advisors who in the eyes of many Nigerians do not seem to have a clue. There are the many explanations, “surprise” submissions, inserted items and lack of fundamentals in putting together a budget. Going from an “incremental budget” to a “zero budget” and the constriction of agencies in an attempt to make government “mean and leaner” as they say. Legislators who pretend not to know the problems and a presidency that appears to be finding its feet. The antic of the Nigerian civil servants who the president had all the confidence in, only to be sidelined by last minute items that his folks did not appear to spot prior to submission. In my new world that would merit an immediate firing to all involved. If we can overcome the embarrassment—the story gets juicy. It reminds me of the old saying that the “devil in the details”.

President Buhari has fired the first salvo—24 heads of agencies and parastatals have deservedly been fired. For me, this is a significant indication that we are in for a protracted effort to rid ourselves of corrupt practices. Yes, recovering money from wayward politicians and their cronies is important and must be done. This action signals a more in-depth recognition that the real war is in reforming the system and institutions. There has been speculation that the civil service is next in line. Reportedly, permanent secretaries and directors are in his line of vision. I would dare to say a broader systemic gut is required. For those who understand the process, nothing happens in civil service without the blessings of the permanent secretaries and directors. No money changes hands without their involvement. They are the ones who resist change the most—yes, change will not come until this bloated bureaucratic system is totally reformed. A good start would be the purging of the entire structure and its leadership. The caveat though are their replacements.

Is the president susceptible to same impunity??? Yes he is if not careful. We hope the President's integrity and moral steadfastness guides his decisions. We hope he will also follow due process no matter how arduous the process. The country needs this example. As Segun Ayobolu of The Nation newspaper states—“impunity is the common factor that binds the thieving public official, the Boko Haram terrorist, the armed robber and elected office holder….in the sinister brotherhood of evil”—the defective elements of our society.

I have to admit that all of these happenings can be very confusing. This is the case because Nigerians have never seen anything like it. So some have turned it into jokes—the “change we need”. That informed my earlier assertion that—sometimes some of us have to be dragged into change. Change was never meant to be orderly. It is also the challenge of democracy. Out of this chaos I believe is something special awaiting Nigerians. These are phases that we must go through as a country. We should have a sense of humor while participating and watching this evolving process. Here we go—let see what happens next. It ain’t so bad watching change after all.

 

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