Divine Plagiarism

‘These are my people.’ It is a fascinating phrase, if you really think about it. Who are my people? Where do they start? Where do they stop? What does one do to become of ‘my people?’ When is one expelled from ‘my people?’ Is it genetic code? We all share Adam and Noah. There is no magic chunk of adenine and cytosine that tells us who ‘our people’ are. Is it skin color? Each society decides color differently. Consider blackness in Brazil vice America. Is it customs? Customs change. National origins? They change as well. Perhaps it is some construct where the past that never was is projected on our present as a way to explain the realities of cultural competition. But perhaps we over-complicate the simple. ‘Our people’ are the people around whom we are free to be ourselves. Around ‘our people,’ we can exhale and kick off our shoes. ‘Our people’ is just another way of saying ‘home.’

With the Kennedy School’s hypersensitivity on race, it is amazing that it took me so long to figure out what my race actually was. Perhaps not so amazing after all. I was told that I needed to define myself by some pre-fabricated identity; that I needed to check a box on some form I had never seen that would tell me who I was and why. It never seemed to fit. I never felt at home with the Bridgers and the Elisabeths. And I certainly could not imagine myself in a smoking jacket. The Ford Taurus-equipped white picket fenced home in the suburbs didn’t match either. Nor NASCAR or pick-up trucks. Always the square peg being hammered into the round hole. And then, it finally occurred to me. Race was never handed down on stone tablets from Mount Sinai. It is just another way of saying ‘the people that you feel a part of.’

My people, I suppose, are soldiers, sailors and airmen. When two military people meet each other, they almost instantly have a rapport. Not just professional commonalities, but true sense of identity. A sense that we are something, and we are different from the out-group other. The sense that ethnicity provides for most people. It can even trump the traditional mechanics of identity, for two military people of different races will often get along better than either with a civilian of the same race. Inter-service rivalry disappears when an unknown civilian enters the mix, in the same exact way that a Cubano and a Dominicano both instantly become Latinos when an Anglo stranger enters the conversation. Military people, regardless of age, race or gender, always banded together in the context of the Kennedy School. There was one point where someone referred to the recent USAFA graduates as ‘the phalanx.‘ But it is not just the in-group/out-group function that tells me that my people are those I serve with. It is the sense of comfort, of ‘knowing the rules,’ yet being able to be myself within those rules that defines me as a member of this group ‘military.’ I know one of my people, and they know me, and we all know the rules. We fight together, live together, and place our lives in each others‘ hands. It is an artificial ethnicity, no doubt, one that inducts spouses, and one that recruits converts. But even when someone leaves the service, the service usually stays with them. Once a Marine, or so the saying goes. So we are a people.

As a people, an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. I remember one class at the Kennedy School, where one of my friends, attempting to compliment me, said ‘I like Dave… he’s not like a normal military guy.’ While I received the statement in the spirit it was sent, something in me rose up against it. In order to accept that compliment, I would have to divorce myself from the group that I identified with. Such a statement would have been completely unacceptable if we were to replace [military guy] with [any other race, ethnicity, or people group]. And then I understood my umbrage: this guy was insulting my people. I remember Marva Dawn’s talk, where she called the military ‘the powers and the principalities.’ The insult wasn’t personal, but against my people. For all the talk of cross-cultural ministry, my culture was not welcome. I was of my people group, and an attack on them was an attack on me.

The military is ‘my people.’ And I take offense when someone insults my people. I see it almost as a sort of racism. But I never followed the equation to its logical conclusion. I never bothered to remove the plank from my own eye. I finally saw it in the midst of all the talk of cross-cultural ministry at Urbana. If my group was basically an artificial ethnicity, and others were then capable of racism against my people, then my people were capable of racism against others. Funny how I conveniently never followed the math all the way through.

Perhaps I knew where it would lead. Every group has a negative impression of the out-group, on some level. Every group is proud. And mine is no different. There is always some flavor of ‘this close and no closer,’ some way of telling the other that ‘you are not the same as we are.’ We call the other ’civilian.’ We do not always get along with ’civilians.’ Quite often, they don’t really understand us. Sometimes, they mock us. And sometimes, I didn’t understand them back. I didn’t really try to find the honor or the nobility in the accountant going to work each day to provide for his family. Sometimes, I even mocked them back. ’Spoiled Harvard rich kids, if they lived in Stalin’s Russia for a week or so they would change their tune.’ I was no better than Marva Dawn, no better than the child of privilege who mocks those whose sacrifice safeguards his freedom. May God forgive me of my strange racism. May I learn to see people as they are, as He sees them. Not as ‘civilians.’

It is good to be proud of one’s people. I am proud of mine. I am honored to serve here, and I am honored to serve with such men and women. I am truly in the midst of heroes and I refuse to denigrate that. We are a brave people, a noble people, a people who serve others. But my love for my people should never become disdain for other peoples. May I find love and understanding for other peoples as well. I will grant the patience to their groups that I ask for mine. I will bother to try to understand before I decide who they are and why. After all, I owe civilians a tremendous debt. They pay for my people, and they are our raison d‘etre. It’s kind of difficult to have guardians without having people to be guarded.