Notes From My Knapsack 9-10-06
Jeff Gill

In a Missing Shadow

Five years on. Hard to believe, in so many ways. Anyone over the age of 10 recalls that day, the experience of watching TV, talking to neighbors, going to church that night as houses of worship and clergy all over threw open the doors and put together a service of prayer and searching.

Searching for . . . well, answers, understanding, sense: about the motives of the action (still not really understood), the roots of the effort (rarely discussed, even now), the nature of God and the place of evil (resolution still pending).

Looking back, I think about a group of young men, gathered around a charismatic, shadowy leader, who mustered anger. Anger at the presence of foreigners in their land, at exploitation of natural resources and the spectre of privilege in the wealth of these alien interlopers, coalesced around a resentment at their strange religion, making inroads through their homeland.

Even with the out of scale hostility, all this can make a measure of sense, until it erupts in senseless slaughter of men, women, and even children; worse when you look closely at their ideology’s activity in their own lands and realize how many of their own people they have killed.

You know this kind of cruelty and rage must be faced, named, and not allowed to spread, but observe with unease how the swift, massive multinational effort to put down this movement generates a new and different level of resentment that has the capacity to spread far beyond the grievances of the original brutal terrorists.

Which is my way of describing the Boxer Rebellion, an uprising a hundred years before 9-11 slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

The "Righteous Harmony Society" had a martial arts element to their group exercises that led to the English nickname "Boxers." In Peking, China, by 1899, diplomats, businessfolk, and missionaries saw the Boxers grow, but labeled them as a threat more to the Imperial House of China than to themselves.

They were tragically wrong.

The Boxers would have happily flown planes into buildings in London or Berlin or New York, if there were planes then, or if they could have even imagined the other side of the world. Instead, they seized and decapitated all the westerners they could, children included, and did their worst to Chinese Christians and any others who associated with the buyers and sellers from across the ocean.

Eight nations, America, England, Germany, Russia, and Japan among them, joined forces to invade and rescue the occupants of western embassies, including many who had taken refuge there other than diplomats. This multinational effort, in hindsight, needed a United Nations, taking a long time to co-ordinate simple processes to get to where they were going. Individual contingents went off on their own national agendas – German soldiers first gained the nickname "Huns" from their British cousins for their treatment of innocent civilians as instructed by the Kaiser.

The Boxers were crushed, some executed, and China returned (briefly) to Imperial control. Popular distaste for the government’s involvement with foreign powers led to civil wars for decades, only ending with Chairman Mao. Russian adventurism and Japanese expansionism, fueled by the Boxer events, set the stage for the Russo-Japanese War, the prelude to the disastrous symphony of 1914 to 1945.

What we are of necessity doing in response to 9-11 has many potentially unnecessary outcomes. National choices today are directly shaping future events ten, twenty, even fifty years and more down the path. Do we know what kind of world we are trying to create? How are the actions we take now forming those future possibilities?

It can take a while to get perspective on such questions, but time doesn’t always give the clearest point of view. In recent years, Oberlin College to our north has had a problem on graduation day. Since 1903, a Memorial Arch has stood near the center of campus, remembering 19 alumni and their children who were killed by the Boxers, missionaries trained at that school. The commencement procession marches through the arch and colonnade on their way to their diplomas.

The problem is that a number of today’s students have decided that they cannot walk through this arch, out of disagreement with Christian evangelism or American imperialism or a lack of mention of Chinese victims on the plaques. So they break from the procession and run around the wings of the Memorial Arch, rejoining their fellows on the other side.

History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; toss him a tale through knapsack77@gmail.com.