Our business

You are at home one day and you peer out your front window. Across the street a grown man is striking a boy repeatedly. You don’t know who they are. You’ve never seen either of them before. They are strangers, but clearly the smaller, weaker one is taking a severe beating from the larger, stronger one. It is not at all clear what is going on. What do you do? Do you: A) call the police; B) wait and see what happens next; C) intervene somehow; or D) draw the blinds closed and turn up the volume on the television?

It will be at least 10 minutes before the police arrive. By then the boy is likely to be severely injured, perhaps dead. Do you wait? Wait for what? How many blows will it take before you act? What will be the defining act that will move you? The boy is looking through bruised eyes toward your window in desperation. There is no one else around. Do you intervene? You know nothing about these two individuals— what business is it of yours? Don’t you have enough concerns of your own?

Perhaps the safest and wisest course is simply to look away? The issues between these strangers are likely too complicated and fraught with uncertainties for you to wade in to try to restore order. After all it is really none of your business.

This, it seems, is the reasoning underpinning recent columns by Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente. She believes the West, and specifically Canada, needs to draw the blinds on the atrocities Moammar Gadhafi is inflicting on his own people with a well-equipped air force and military.

Wente doesn’t see any national interest at stake in trying to protect the Libyan people from their clearly mad oppressor. She considers herself a reformed “liberal interventionist. It is, in her view, a civil war—one in which we don’t understand the tribal culture or history that still largely defines this North Africa nation.

Perhaps in our ignorance we might make matters worse. Perhaps in lending assistance we empower a greater thug? And if we intervene in Libya—are we bound to get involved in every place a strongman is tyrannizing his citizens? Where does our responsibility end?

For Wente and others, the West’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade has turned her off meddling in others’ affairs. Both of these adventures have been bloody, costly and long. There was no quick in and out. No democracy in a box—needing just the assembly of a security force, a free market, and a few model hospitals, schools and courts. Like many other things in the modern age—we want our interventions to be quick, self-gratifying and pain free.

Though she doesn’t say it out loud, the implicit justification for drawing the blinds and ignoring the beating occurring across the street is that these folks aren’t us—they look and sound differently than anyone we know. We don’t know what they believe, what they value or aspire to. They are aliens. Complex and unpredictable aliens. We aren’t equipped to help them. At least that is what folks like Wente tell themselves.

But I don’t think she believes it. It is a narrative folks use in an attempt to pierce the dull feeling that gathers around this detached view of the world. It is how they have given in to apathy regarding the events beyond the blinds. Numb, with the right spokesperson, becomes cool and righteous.

Numbness, however, is a poison. It corrodes the basic fibres of our being. No amount of rationalization can erase our fundamental responsibility, each of us has, to help others in need. There is no story we can tell ourselves that explains how we stood by and watched Tutsis and Hutus butcher each other by the hundreds of thousands in Rwanda a decade and a half ago. That we didn’t come out of Somalia as white-hatted heroes was not an excuse to allow 800,000 die in Rwanda. We know this is true—we may not yet be ready to admit it, but we know it is.

The circumstances in North Africa today are very different than Rwanda in 1994. But the common element is that innocent people are at risk from thugs with weapons. In the West we have the ability and wherewithal to limit the extent of the atrocities. We cannot look away.

We can talk about what action to take and try to assess the risks as best we are able, but in the end we have a responsibility do what we can. Anything less is ultimately self-destructive.

As much as we think it will soothe our jagged nerves, we cannot draw the blind and ignore the terrible things happening just outside our window.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca