A friend died two weeks ago. Her memorial service was held on Friday the 17th. She was not a close friend, but a lovely person who was a joy to be around. A schoolteacher with a big voice and a bigger heart, Roseanne had a broad Boston accent. She had health problems, though, and died much too soon. Former students, some of them Hispanics, came to the service and attested to the positive effect she'd had on their lives.
It isn't hard to see many of the ways our lives are blessed here in the U.S.: we can drive or fly around the country and overseas, we have exotic foods (and familiar fruits and vegetables nearly year-round) brought to our local supermarket, we can order books, clothing, toys, antiques, etc., from our home computer and have them delivered to our door within days.
It may seem strange to consider a memorial service a luxury, much the way these goods and services are. I don't mean how funerals are so often conducted in this country -- with the pomp and lavish expense described so pointedly by Jessica Mitford in her classic 1963 expose The American Way of Death -- but simply that we can have them at all. Funerals are in fact a luxury to which many other humans beings across the globe simply do not have access, and this has been the case for many others in the past.
It's not so much a matter of wealth versus poverty as peace versus war. Unless we become scholars, all we know of wars is basically large-scale reports, arrows on maps, victories and surrenders. But there are thousands -- millions -- of lives who are more intimately acquainted with wars, and whose lives are damaged and cut short by them. The import of this is easy to forget unless you think of a significant death in your own circle and then try to magnify it by the numbers.
For example, there are at least four large-scale political conflicts going on in the world right now:
1. The Naxalite-Maoist insurgency in India (small but ongoing since 1967; considerably heated up last year)
2. The civil war in Afghanistan (now in its fifth phase since 1978, and totaling somewhere between half a million and two million deaths)
3. The Somali Civil War (19 years' running and nearing a half million dead) and
4. The Iraq War (dating from 2003, with somewhere between one-half and one-and-a-half million fatalities)
Reportedly, each of these conflicts accounts for at least 1,000 violent deaths per year.
Smaller political conflicts -- at least 15 to 19 -- have been going on in places from Algeria, Namibia, and Chad to Thailand, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Israel. The total casualties in each of these ranges from potentially a quarter of a million during the series of insurgencies in Colombia since the 1970s to less than a hundred in the al-Qaeda crackdown in Yemen (brand new this year). Some, like the five-year-old fighting in the Niger River Delta of Nigeria, are so remote and of so little interest to the West that it is simply unknown how many people have died in them; there are simply not any reporters or impartial observers on the ground to report back to the rest of the world.
Burned, drowned, hacked to death, or mutilated afterward, or eaten by wild animals, many of the victims of ethnic hatreds, drug wars, religious and political crusades, and just plain struggles for food, land, or power are undoubtedly lost, unidentified, tossed in mass graves. These are sons, brothers, fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters, uncles, grandkids utterly lost to their families and never recovered to be properly mourned by their loved ones.
That's why I regard the American funeral as a luxury. Survivors of the dead in today's (and hundreds of past) wars elsewhere don't have the opportunity to recover the body of their family member, and are too busy fleeing further violence or trying to stay alive and find food as famine, disease, shortage, and exposure to the elements demand their time and attention.
What constitutes mourning for them? And are we, amid all our comfort and leisure, because we allow our government to pursue violent adventures overseas and American companies to sell weapons all over the world, inadvertently stealing this precious luxury from other human beings who need and deserve to mourn their losses as much as we?
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For more information on current conflicts around the world, visit GlobalSecurity.org and the Wikipedia list of ongoing conflicts.
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