This is an act of love

A friend of mine was a teenager in the Basque country in the 80s. If you know anything about that part of Europe at that time, you’ll know that it was a time of turmoil: the region had recently been declared a separate nationality within Spain, but a number of powers had not (yet) been transferred, and Franco’s government (which had violently policed the use of Basque names and language) had only recently ended. There were divisions in the Basque nationalist movement about goals and methods. Let’s just say there was a lot of violence, some of it in the form of terrorist attacks.

My friend was, as I said, a teenager. One night on his way home from sports practice, the electricity of his whole city went out as the result of a targeted attack on the power supply. My friend was alone (he thought) in a parking garage. In the complete darkness following the power cut, he was suddenly pushed to the ground and a gun was put to his temple. “Who are your friends,” the person who held the gun demanded of him. My friend didn’t know who it was — Spanish or Basque nationalist — and so wasn’t sure what answer would anger most. “I don’t have any friends,” he said. This exchange was repeated for a while, with the gun holder insisting my friend declare who he was “with” and my friend insisting he held no particular sympathies, until the power suddenly came back on and the person ran away. My friend never saw who it was.

I have been sitting with this story these past weeks. The urgency to declare alliances. The divisiveness. The violence in clamping down on those who are not on one’s “side.” The if-you-are-not-with-us-you-are-against-us mentality. The absolute refusal by many to see the possibility for peace.

I feel like the answer is not in “I have no friends” but rather in “we are all human.” And also in knowing that it is almost impossible to have that clarity when there is a gun pushed to your temple.

And so it falls to those of us who stand on the outside to hold that truth, that love. It falls to us to say: it is an act of love to call out injustice and fear. It is an act of love to say, killing children, taking hostages, bombing hospitals is wrong, because we are all human. It is an act of love to put our bodies between more guns and more temples, to say, stop, enough is enough.

It is an act of love for us to help each other hold onto our humanity.