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Short introduction:
Once upon a time, about seven years ago, in a faraway land called Serbia, I was enjoying coffee with friends. We were minding our own business when an angry-looking man in a red T-shirt approached our table. At first, I didn’t pay him much attention, but then it became impossible to ignore him.
Collective guilt
The man accused us of collective guilt for NATO bombing his nation two decades earlier. People died. Civilians included. We’re a part of NATO, so we’re guilty by association, or so I was told. That was all it took for him to attack us. Luckily, only verbally, but for a moment there, I was afraid things would get ugly.
We were in a foreign country, tourists, and a stranger was blaming us for murdering the children of his nation, threatening our lives and the lives of our children. Things were getting heated, and he warned us that we would never leave his country alive. His words, as I remember them:
“You have our children's blood on your hands. You murdered our children. Soon, I will watch you carry your dead children in your arms. Soon, you will pay for your sins. We will make sure of it! I will rejoice when I see you suffer as we did! Justice will be served.”
We live as peaceful, distant neighbors, his country and mine.
I was in my “Ghandy - we’re all brothers and sisters mode” while this man’s soul was overrun with darkness. A darkness that found its nest there because of trauma. The trauma of seeing the people he loved get bombed. He told us, a grown man sobbing, stories of how he carried dead children in his arms after they were killed in the bombing.
My perspective differs, naturally. He didn’t care about the reasoning behind the bombing, the justifications, and we didn’t offer them. There was no point. The man was clearly in pain, carrying all this hate, accumulating it, nurturing it, until one day, it would come out and consume him whole and everyone in his vicinity.
When I looked at this man, I saw his pain. I sensed his suffering. I felt nothing but love for the man. Compassion and sadness for what he had to go through. Until he threatened my unborn children. That tends to complicate things. And he felt nothing but hate for me. Blame and resentment for something I had nothing to do with.
Nor did any of my friends, and I believe he would gladly kill us all at that moment if the situation were a bit different. Not just us but our children as well, as he kept threatening. We were labeled murderers for something an organization our country is a part of had done to his country, justified or not.
At the time, we were all little kids, probably about the same age as the ones he carried in his arms from under the rubble. It mattered not to the man.
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About the podcast/voiceover:
I have begun narrating my articles, giving them a more personal note.
The recordings are a “one take only” kind, with no editing.
English is not my native language, so I apologize in advance.
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AUDIO: Are We Guilty of Something Someone Did Before Our Time?