Wandschneider mug

Over the years some 26 of them on Main Street in the Chieftain now, I have written many Christmas columns. I have remembered a cold cold Christmas in Minnesota, a Chaldean mass in Turkey, a drive across the field to the Butterfield place up OK Gulch in Wallowa County. I have remembered childhood and children, parents and parenting, siblings, cousins, shirttail relatives and friends, remembered flying and driving and skiing and skating into Christmas

But this year I think first about the awful school shooting in Connecticut. And I think about Aleppo, a city I visited and loved 45 years ago, a city continuously inhabited by people of many faiths for over 4,000 years and now shattered by civil war. I remember other places I visited before they fell apart: Shiraz and Esfahan in Iran, Beirut in Lebanon. I am struck again and maybe harder than any time in my conscious life at how cruel and crazy and destructive we humans can be.

On the day of the Connecticut shootings, but before either of us knew about them, a friend and I were talking about Henry VIII, a king who invented a new religion as he himself played god and had wives he no longer wanted murdered. We wondered how cruel and evil humans can be, and whether we might be getting better. But no he and I are also reading together about Indians in our Civil War bayoneting American Indian babies at Sand Creek is a minor chord in that vicious affair in which friends and relatives killed each other and troops burned and ravaged each other and civilian populations.

That was over 150 years ago, you say.

So lets go to the 20th century, which one might label a hundred-year killing spree, from the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire to deadly dictatorships in Germany, Spain, and Japan and Russia, where millions died in the cold of WWII and millions more in the cold Siberian camps of Stalin. This all followed by genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda, and that awful fight between Iran and Iraq that had 12-year-olds charging across mine fields on their way to heaven.

The new ones no better. Vicious fights in Africa, continuing violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, deadly confusion after elation in Libya and Egypt, and the violence of deranged individuals in the heart of Norway and the heart of America.

What to make of it all? Henry VIII thought he ruled by divine right, Crusaders thought they had a mandate from God to kill the infidels, and the worst of the Islamic terrorists today find their sanction in a holy book. Kip Kinkel had god-like voices telling him to shoot classmates at Thurston High. We dont know what voices the young man in Connecticut was listening to.

The common thread in this gory affair seems to be a searing belief that I/we are right, and he/ she/ they are wrong. Stronger yet, I/we have god on our side or some direct message from the divine, and he/she/they are not just wrong, but enemies of the divine, and less than, maybe not quite, human. Thats what the early European explorers said about the Indians, what the colonists said about African-American slaves, what the Crusaders said about the infidels, and all people who hate seem to think about the objects of their emotions.

Fortunately, there are other emotions, other paths in the world. There are saints of all religions who have preached love over hate, empathy over disdain, who have sacrificed money and status and even their own lives to point to common humanity. Most often the motives are not so broad or noble in the beginning it is the particular first-grader threatened by a madman who sparks the teacher into action, the gut reaction to save a child or friend or comrade that drives some to self-sacrifice.

We see something more in their actions a basic human goodness that we hope lives in us all. That, it seems to me, is what we might celebrate this Christian Christmas the innocence of a new child coming into the world, humbleness at the stable, empathy with all the babes of the world and the memory of that common origin showing past the misdeeds and mistakes and even the things we recognize as evil that are also part of our common humanity. Humanity, not divinity.

Rich Wandschneider is a longtime Wallowa County resident and a regular columnist for the Chieftain.