Caution

Posted by parhad on July 12, 2001 at 00:18:44:

A word of warning for all those heavily engaged in helping the people of our homelands...do not forget that this has all happened before, and will again. Our best hope of averting the cyclical repetition of violence and loss our people have suffered since we can remember, is to do something new...something calculated to add another dimension to our struggles.

Narsai reminisced once about how he'd found letters in a chest written to an old uncle of his from people in Urmia after the killings of 1915. The letters thanked him for sending money back home, from America where he was living and working as a young man in factories. For each one dollar, the letters said, he had saved one family.

He cried again telling me that. I'm sure that in the back of his mind is that, and other memories...these people have no one else. And yet, even after thousands dollars spent today to save the descendants of those same families...if nothing is added to the equation, we could be back here in another sixty years spending millions on THEIR descendants.

Before any of you condemn these feeble attempts at altering course or ading another facet to the approach, remember we've been here before, lots of times...and will be again, for things wont change for the better for us unless WE take a hand in not just providing band-aids everytime an Assyrian is hurt somewhere, sometime.. we must figure out a way to get far more resources behind us than just the immediate things we need to put a roof on a house or food on the table.

That is why I am expending all this time boring you to death. There are most definitely several things we could add to the equation, but all of them require a new mentality, a new way of looking at us and the world. Those people we have today who are entrenched in old ways, who almost seem desperate to keep things as they are because to do so ensures a "position" for them, those people are the ones madly looking for ways to keep us from growing up, and that includes the church, not just "civic" leaders or, god help us, "intellectuals".

The church is never happier than when we are suffering...they built their house on our stooped backs. Our other leaders likewise would not want to see us look elsewhere for they know excellently well how quickly they would be exposed if we shone a light on our community. If ever anyone needed a Bug Man, it was us.