"Hello, Brother"

Original art by Fenville High School student Quinna Perkins for the 2018 "Un Mundo" Celebration  

I don't know his name yet, but as I type these words I am full of love and gratitude for him and his act of Grace, though it's mixed still with sadness and shock and horror and grief felt more than 8,000 miles away. 

He was the first victim at the mosque shooting in Christchurch, NZ, a man shot and killed where he stood simply because he had answered the call to prayer, and because for him those prayers were offered up in a mosque.

When this man saw the other enter the mosque, full of hate and burning with destruction, he welcomed him, greeted him, extended the grace and love of his religion. He looked at the man who would kill him an instant later, and in a simple gesture of humanity said "hello, brother." 

"Hello, brother" were his last words on this earth. His last act was one of brotherhood. Of all the outcomes of yet another brutal day in our human history, this man's words were the ones I would have endure. In them is the secret power we've all been wanting to come and save our world. These words should be the first words any of us say when we look at any other human being. 

Hello brother,  marhabaan 'akhi,  مرحبا اخي, hola hermano, היי אחי, salut frere, hallo bruder, Ni hao xiongdi, Privet brat, nwa m nwoke, ... and on and on and on. The sound of them being spoken should be so familiar that we recognize it in every and any language spoken in our world.

Hello, brother. Hello, sister.

The weight of this world has felt so heavy to me since November, 2016, when America promoted the darkest legacies of our past to the highest office in our land under the deception that it would make us great again. Anyone who studies the history I study and who has dedicated now almost half my career teaching students and teachers that human history includes episodes of mass murder, even genocides like the Holocaust that grow from seeds of hatred, indifference, ignorance, division, and fear, is more apt to recognize those seeds for what they are as the first weeds that sprout in small ways in our local places and classrooms, and in large ways across our country and world. Those are not the seeds of greatness. 

Since 2016 the hatred multiplied by social media and magnified from those in power have seemed so overwhelming to me because they are as ubiquitous and all-consuming as fire when it sweeps across our parched lands, be they national, international, or local: Antisemitism. Islamaphobia. Xenophobia. Racism. Nazism. White Supremacy. Violence. Violence. Violence. 

The fires of the past burning with fresh fuel, consuming and growing: Heather Heyer, a 32-year old woman, murdered by the other, a neo-Nazi driving his car into her at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. A Nazi murdered a woman in the United States in 2017 because he believes in white supremacy and she did not. Let that sink in, if you can even get your mind around it.   

For so long I could not get my mind around it. 

The last time Nazis murdered people it took a world war to stop it and perhaps as many as 85 million deaths. How many will have to die this time? There were at least 50 more in New Zealand last week.

What can we do when the hatred grows so huge and any individual one of us can feel so alone and so powerless in this world. 

We are brothers, because we are human.

Years ago I had the opportunity to miss home from the other side of the world. I was a college student studying abroad in Spain for several months, and one day, feeling homesick and adrift, overwhelmed by differences of language and culture that made it so hard to do simple tasks in a language and city that was foreign to me, I had a chance encounter. An older man approached me as I sat alone in a cafe, I remember him to be in his 70's or perhaps early 80's, and asked me who I was. This man who could not have looked or lived his life any more different than I had. Still, he found me and crossed the space between us in a few beautiful words. 

I had a brief conversation with him in my elementary Spanish, the only language bridge available between us. I told him I was a student who had come to Spain, to learn about the heritage, the language, the culture, the people. When I said that he sat down next to me, smiled, and said "You are here to study us. Then we are brothers. We are brothers because we are human." 

In his native Spanish it sounds so much more beautiful and poetic. He said "Somos hermanos porque somos humanos. 

And my homesickness was immediately replaced with brotherhood, and my loneliness turned to wholeheartedness and gratitude. I was suddenly sitting next to a brother who thirty seconds earlier came from a time and place and language that was foreign to me, but now felt like home.

I see you.

Six weeks ago I attended a seminar in Lansing for several hundred school administrators. At a day-long session led by Calvin Terrell, an educator from Arizona who would talk with us about Decolonizing Pedagogy: Using Education as a Social Healer, the first thing we were asked to do was to introduce ourselves to some other people in the room. It was a standard adult learning task, pretty much the way every seminar starts, but still I was a little stiff when he asked us to do it. I had just settled into my chair. Had just connected to the free Wifi network and started nibbling on a cheese danish. But still, it was the right thing to do, so I set my coffee and danish on the table and tipped the top screen of my laptop down to see who else was in the room, to do my civic duty. 

But Terrell had a different idea about how it would go. He asked us to stand up, to walk around, to look people in the eyes, and to say "I see you." He told us to actually look at and see people as we greeted them, to be present, to stand inside where our shoes stood and not be distracted like most of us are so much of the time. To shake hands, to look in the eyes of one other person at a time, and with simple humanity, tell that person "I see you." 

It was a beautiful five minutes. I connected more with a dozen strangers with those simple three words than any ice breaker I'd ever done. When I sat down again, the room was full of warmth and energy.

Terrell then told us our schools, like the world our students live in, like the world we live in, is hungry for connection and suffering for the lack of it. So many of our students, so many of us, go through our days and lives not seeing others or being seen by others. If we could make our classrooms places where every person sees every other person, we would change lives, and might just change the world. He had my full attention now, and I knew that he was right. He had already changed a room from a standard seminar into the beginning of a community, in just five minutes, with just three words.

The Other. 

Polish travel journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski summarized his most important lessons from a lifetime spent traveling the world, encountering humans who are different than him, and writing about it in a small, powerful book called The Other. The other, as I've written several times in this essay, is that human who we do not recognize as sharing our same humanity. The other is an alien, an invader, an infidel. Kapuscinski writes "We treat the Other above all as a stranger (yet the Other does not have to mean a stranger), as the representative of a separate species, but the most crucial point is that we treat him as a threat." 

A witness to the Second World War of the 20th-Century that killed so many tens of millions, Kapuscinski warned us as we approached the 21st Century that race, nationality, and religion still divided people in ways that were dangerous, and our destruction, or our salvation, lied in the way we were dived by or united across these divisions. Would we see difference and make that difference Other? Or would we look in the eyes of someone new to us and see in them our common humanity?  

These days, too often, we choose division. Or we see division and feel fear and remain silent and indifferent. This division feeds the fire that can only consume and destroy us all. All of us. After all, Kapuscinski writes "Not only is he an Other for me, I am an Other for him too." Kapuscinski warned us to be careful in this world, because Others "have arms (weapons), and no alternatives."  

But Kapuscinski ultimately had hope after his lifetime of travel, after countless experiences of finding brothers and sisters in places and cultures and languages so different than his own, of seeing and being seen for the human he is and seeing the human in those he met. He wrote that "if we can make the Other familiar, (into family), then history does not have to be destiny." 

So hello, brother. Hello, sister.

And this is why what endures out of the shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand have to be the words of humanity, and not hateful, destructive acts of the other. The two words of a beautiful human in his last act on earth have to hit the world with more force than a bullet ever could. 

Let those words be the legacy that changes our world, the answer we have been looking for, the simple one that actually cuts right through the complexity and confusion and frustration and fear and heartbreak of these times, to find each other again. 

All it takes is for us to see our neighbor, to actually see our neighbor, no matter how that neighbor looks, and say "Hello, brother. Sister, hello. I see you."