A Better Place

The Syria debate seems to me up close and personal because of an incident on the streets of Baltimore over thirty years ago, along with the fact that my father was subjected to mustard gas attacks twice during WWI.  The accounts of WWI mustard gas attacks are remote, but a reminder of the unlimited means of waging war even supposedly civilized governments can go to when there are no restraints.  The streets of Baltimore are much more vivid in my memories.

I and my family were driving somewhere through downtown Baltimore when we spotted a man viciously beating a woman on one of the side streets.   What were we to do?  We hesitated only a second.  Stopping the car, my teenage son and I got out and approached the scene.  First motioning my son back out of reach, I walked up and told the man to stop.  Surprisingly, he was cowed by my appearance, stopped the beating, muttered an apology and, along with the woman, quickly disappeared down an alley.  Then a man got out of a car parked down the street and came over to thank me for what I’d done.  He said he’d been there since before we arrived and had been sitting there wondering what to do.  He had wanted to call the police, but they could not have arrived in time to make any difference.

It was only afterwards that I thought how foolish I’d been.  I was unarmed, the man doing the beating possibly, even probably, armed and violent.  My family was jeopardized.  I didn’t know, and never would, the circumstances – was it a domestic quarrel, a pimp beating a prostitute for withholding her earnings, a drug incident, or what?  I knew only that it was a morally repugnant act that must be stopped, and I was the only one capable of acting to do so.  It was totally foolish on my part, but I felt then and I still feel that the world was a minutely better place for what I had done.

I had acted while the man down the street simply observed because I hadn’t stopped to think.  We used to talk in the office of “paralysis by analysis.”  Too often we get so caught up in the pros and cons of complex issues that we never get around to acting on them.  Syria is that kind of issue, and we and the media are in danger of getting caught up in that kind of paralysis.  We know chemical warfare, especially against your own innocent civilians, is morally abhorrent; it has been declared so twice by international conventions, and we have only to look at pictures from WWI, and Syria, to understand why.  We know that, unrestrained, it is a practice that will spread.  We know other morally abhorrent acts have occurred in the past without action.  We know the “police” are not available, that there is no  useful international law to invoke and that if meaningful action to stop it is to occur, it falls on us, like it or not.  And we know there may well be subsequent undesirable consequences.  The real question is, will the world be a better place if we act?  All the rest is paralysis by analysis.

It is not a new question, as my Baltimore street incident illustrates.  Albert Camus addressed it in La Chute, a novel in which a champion swimmer fails to rescue a man drowning in the Seine because he’s on the way to a party, the night is cold, and, you know.  The rest of his life is a fall dominated by his sense of moral failure.  Much further back, it is the story of The Good Samaritan, and what might have been had the Samaritan not stopped.  We as a nation have failed enough so that we undoubtedly could shrug off inaction on Syria as just another case of choices too complex to bother about.  But we shouldn’t.  Sometimes the moral choices are the really important ones.