14  THE ODDS

MY FATHER IS OBSESSED WITH SHARK WEEK on the Discovery Channel. He finds the entire debacle both hilarious and strangely exciting, watching those magnificent, graceful, terrifying sea monsters roam their underwater kingdoms. He laughs at how built-up the tension is, how a TV station tries to milk the fears of the public to pay their bills. But he still watches, and sometimes I watch with him.

I am afraid of sharks. I am also afraid of the water in general, never having been a strong swimmer. As a child I always dreaded the clammy feel of seaweed attaching itself to my feet in a lake. I always imagined dead fish squelching in every step I took in mud and muck. There’s something about not being able to really see into the water that scares me the most. We fear what we cannot see, what we cannot control. And sometimes we fixate on certain illogical fears in order to avoid facing a reality that has the capacity to do us, and others, much more harm. There’s a saying to illustrate this truth that goes something like this: we fear sharks instead of mosquitoes. And yet, on an average year, sharks kill less than six people worldwide (more people die from their refrigerators falling on them) while mosquitoes kill on average over two hundred thousand people a year. But a dark looming shape in the gloom of water is much easier for our brains to fear than a tiny little bug carrying a virus that can prove fatal.

There is no mosquito week on Discovery Channel. I think this is because malaria is not a threat to most people in the continental United States due to the toxic chemicals we sprayed decades ago. It’s not a threat that affects our children, clutched in our hands. It is a threat that kills other people’s children, poor children, Black and Brown and Asian children. Children we don’t care as much about as our own, and we are not made to feel bad about this.

There is a reason an entire culture can choose to fixate their collective fears on vaccines or terrorist attacks or sharks. While all of these categories do contain some risks, the fear and paranoia are not relative to the actual odds of something bad happening. It’s similar to the logic I hear when certain groups of people love to tell me how dangerous immigrant and refugees are to the United States. It’s a convenient way to blame an outside group for the anxieties we carry within.

When distant friends and family members post meme after meme on Facebook about the horrors that Muslim refugees are supposedly committing in Europe—how they’re hell-bent on coming here and killing people (or perhaps just taking jobs and welfare), how we need to take care of our own first—there’s no real way to argue. People who share and promote ideas that demonize entire groups of people are not interested in sharing truth—they’re interested in peddling fear. And it works, wonderfully, for those who sell it. It wins them a semblance of control and certainty over their life, and it shores up the boundaries of who is a part of the in-group and who is not. It also wins elections, tipping the balance of power to the one who already has it but who is capitalizing on the fear of losing it.

I understand this because I am a part of it too. Humans long to have an easy answer to the complex problems of the world, and I am among them. My way of dealing with the tension is to tell anyone within listening distance than immigrants are a blessing. After all, I have spent a third of my life both living with and being blessed by refugees, many of them Muslims. I can point to economic evidence—our economy depends and runs on immigration continuing. Or I can bring up the moral argument—we have a responsibility to help resettle people at the forefront of human rights abuses and those escaping the trauma of war and extreme poverty. Or I can go the theological route, hauling out verse after verse where God commands his people to look after the stranger and the foreigner among them. But sometimes I get tired of trying to convince my fellow citizens of the humanity of God’s children born someplace else. Sometimes I just want to take a step back and point to the bigger picture. To swivel the heads of those around me in order for them to look at the mosquitoes, as it were, all around us instead of quaking in front of the image of a wide, sharp-toothed shark.

If you live in the United States, you have a 1 in 6 chance of dying from heart disease, and a 1 in 7 chance of dying from cancer. You have a 1 in 88 chance of dying by suicide. You have a 1 in 96 chance of dying from an opioid overdose (a statistic that is on the rise and will continue to grow), a 1 in 103 chance of being killed in a car crash, and a 1 in 285 chance of being killed by a gun assault.1

All these statistics have factors that make them more complicated, of course. You are more likely to die in a car crash, for instance, if you actually own a car and drive it most days. But overall, these numbers are a data-driven picture that can help clear the fog from our eyes, if only for a moment. When I take a moment to meditate on these numbers, to stop and consider my own demise and of those around me, a few thoughts float to the surface. Reflections on how our bodies decay, how our brain chemistry betrays us, and our technological advances have unseen and hidden consequences.

I see a despairing sadness in our national discourse on safety. In recent years, as political rhetoric has become more blatantly racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic, I have seen the language used to talk about immigrants in general and Muslim refugees in particular twisted by fear. When Donald Trump was campaigning for the presidency, and indeed even after he got elected, he liked to recite a poem about a snake that bit and killed the woman who tried to help it. He liked to make comparisons between the snake and Syrian refugees who were fleeing a desperate situation and longing for a place to start over. He called Mexicans rapists and talked incessantly about Latin American gangs like the MS-13 and their brutal methods of extracting compliance or revenge. He would pull grieving parents on stages and give them microphones—but only if their children had been killed by immigrants.

As much as it concerns me that a prominent leader would do these things, what is more depressing are the crowds at these events. Men and women, mostly older, mostly White, faces set in stony anger or joyous exaltation. They clap for this language, the words that mirror what is in their own hearts. The threat is outside; the threat is another person. The threat is a Syrian woman, a scarf on her head, a child on her hip. She is not a precious person made in the image of God. She is a snake in disguise, waiting to strike. She is an infestation (language that all genocides start with, it should be noted). The Syrian refugee woman is vermin, coming to take jobs and resources, coming to take what should be yours. She is a sad story, to be sure, but we cannot help all of them, the overwhelming hordes of need. Americans—the real Americans—have our own families to think of. We have a commitment to safety and responsibility. We are only doing what is wise, what is necessary.

I cannot watch very many of these political rallies aimed at stoking fear and shoring up power, but sometimes I feel compelled to. My ignorance, after all, will not make my neighbors—especially those who are immigrants, refugees, nonnative English speakers, non-White, nonmale—any safer. But one question remains as I listen to the rhetoric, none of it new or even especially unique to my country. It’s the same old song, and it’s one that my own mind still quietly sings sometimes when I look at the crowds at the rallies proposing to make American great or to put it first. It’s the song that seduces nearly all of us, at some point or other in our lives. It’s the song that says we will only be safe or happy or at rest if certain types of people ceased to exist.

One of my favorite poets is Padraig O’Tuama, an Irish man who has seen his share of conflict in his life. “Peace that comes through the annihilation of the enemy,” he says, “is no peace at all.”2 O’Tuama warns his listeners to beware of the seeds of eradication that are planted in our own hearts. They love to grow in our troubled soils. I see this principle at work in my own community, which overwhelmingly voted not just for a president but for his policies promising to make America great, safe, and secure—and free from the threat of outsiders. This line of thinking seems practical, but we need to follow the fear all the way to its logical conclusion. Why not hang all of our hopes for safety on banning refugees, on limiting immigration from non-European countries, or building a giant wall at the Mexican border? Why not bomb all Muslims out of existence? Why not eradicate all of those who look like they fit the prototype of a terrorist, a threat to our well-being?

I know this is real because I feel it myself. When I look at a president who almost gleefully twists the narrative of women and children who have suffered at the hands of oppression—when from a stage he calls them snakes and serpents and vermin and refuse—I have the same feeling deep within. Wouldn’t my life be better, simpler, and easier if everyone who hated my beloved neighbors simply didn’t exist anymore? The seed of eradication lives within me too, though I don’t want to admit it. In truth it is behind many of our most basic drives for safety and security, for wellness and greatness.

Like everybody else in my country, I have a 1 in 3.6 million chance of being killed in a terrorist attack by someone who is not a US citizen.3 It is so far-fetched that to waste any amount of time worrying about it is almost an affront to God and the life that God so freely gives to us. But I have an almost 100 percent chance of dehumanizing others, of wishing them to cease to exist, of longing for the death of others in order to feel safe and secure and happy.

Jesus knows what it’s like to move through the world knowing full well that some of our neighbors hate our other neighbors. Jesus knew this, and yet he still asked us to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves. I recognize I write this from a position of privilege—the power differential between me and a woman from Syria experiencing forced migration is enormous—and Jesus was aware of this too. We can uproot the seeds of hateful eradication within our own hearts while still holding power accountable and still demanding true righteousness, which is justice for the oppressed. We can commit to rid ourselves of dehumanizing others and call out every friend, family member, and neighbor who uses language or rhetoric designed to instill fear or hatred in another.

I used to fear the things hiding in the murk of water. The decay that swirled around, the shark lurking in the shadows seeking to devour me. But evil is real, and it takes on a much simpler form in our world. It is in the cancer that kills us, the car accidents that snatch away the years. And it is also in the fear that seizes our hearts.

There’s a greater evil within us than without: the evil of believing and acting on our fear of other people. The notion that if we eradicate the right people, people made in the image of God, we will be secure. The sharks are not the ones that will get us. It is the belief that we can somehow strong-arm our way into safety—that our means, no matter how violent, are acceptable because our own safety is worth all of the harm it brings to others. This is what we should fear: what our own desperate desire for safety might end up doing to those who are beloved in the eyes of God, whom we so carelessly call snakes and sharks.