Our Lost Innocence

We should find it comforting to be a distinctive university in a time marked by war. We, the EMU community, stand for peace and justice amid a world often defined by the opposite. Members of our community will march on Washington this Saturday to call for an end to our nation's war. Hopefully even more of us will walk in the peace vigil in Washington this March. This is why we must find the events of last weekend at Guilford College alarming.

As a small, liberal arts institution, Guilford College in North Carolina very closely mirrors our own university. Its mission statement appeals to the same distinctive community of learning that we hold so closely. More importantly, Guilford roots itself in a Quaker tradition of peace and justice very similar to our own Mennonite understanding of the world.

As an outsider, these values of peace and justice now seem very distant from their campus. Early last Saturday morning, Faris Khader, Osama Sabbah, and Omar Awartani experienced a brutal physical and verbal attack by Guilford students on Guilford's campus.

Awartani, a NC State student visiting former classmates from a Quaker school in the West Bank who now attend Guilford, told reporters, "I've seen Israeli soldiers doing this to me in Palestine, but I've never seen this with citizens. It just came with punches, kicks and brass knuckles. There were witnesses that told me they were picking up rocks and bricks and hitting me."

Like EMU, Guilford likely has an increasingly diverse community that includes many members from outside the Quaker tradition. That, however, does not change the university's core values. Nor should such a reality change the core values of EMU.

What then does it mean to be a distinctive university that places itself apart from much of the world in its stand for peace and justice? The events at Guilford force us to question just how different this community is. We are not unlike Guilford. Such an event could happen on our campus at the hands of members of our own community. Are we prepared to lose our innocence?

I gain a similar sense of lost innocence from the actions of our nation in Iraq. Perhaps the political wrangling of President Bush's State of the Union address and Senator Webb's rebuttal did not show it, but we as a nation must grapple with our own failed initiative. While we went into Iraq with an expressed interest in liberating the nation from a dictator, our own rule of the nation presides over wretched and dangerous conditions. The innocence of our ideals has once again been lost.

Lost in the mostly domestic agendas outlined in the two speeches are over 3,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives lost in the conflict. President Bush's platitudes of supporting the troops that saw Republicans and Democrats leaping from their seats for a standing ovation like puppets does nothing to ease the hardship of soldier or Iraqi. As people of peace, we cannot take any comfort in President Bush's plans to increase deployment to Iraq by 20,000 troops and the size of the Army and Marines by 92,000 troops.

The appeals to liberty and security from both sides of the aisle are far too stale to inspire. We have seen the emptiness of these words as we shove public money at Iraq, only to see it gobbled up by American corporations. The words become even more hollow as we see friends and acquaintances sent to Iraq for a dirty service to the nation. As a nation and as individuals, we have no claims to a sense of innocence. This is our war.

What now will we do with our lost innocence? We are a university of peace and justice. We are a church community that appeals to the teachings of Jesus. But we are not the only group where leaders speak of lofty ideals. Being a distinctive community requires far more.