A Man for a More Perfect World

If we can't all be Pat Tillmans, we can at least make sure we don't forget him.

In a perfect world, men like Pat Tillman would never die. They would live forever as symbols of sacrifice and profiles in courage. In the world G-d originally intended, a man who stuns the nation by giving up a $3 million football contract to join the military after 9/11 would be rewarded with long life, health, and happiness. When he died, he would be at home, surrounded by grandchildren and great-grandchildren, rather than in a forlorn desert, at the hands of ruthless killers in Afghanistan.

But our military is in the Middle East because we don't live in a perfect world. Instead, it's a world where innocent children die of cancer while bullets find the Pat Tillmans of this world. A world peace-loving countries suffer without natural resources while others are blessed with oil.

Stories of bloodshed and genocide stretch from the earliest histories of mankind--from Cain and Abel all the way to Saddam's anonymous mass graves, from the Holocaust, which we commemorated last Sunday to the genocide in Rwanda, in which, ten years ago this month, 800,000 innocent and poor black men, women, and children were slaughtered in under a hundred days.

The world was mostly silent during those massacres, as silent as G-d himself. They did nearly nothing to save them--not because they dislike blacks and Jews but because they love themselves. The history of the world is a tale of selfishness and self-absorption. If someone is suffering on the other side of the world, what does it have to do with me? Only a small minority of people have taken to heart the principal religious message which says that every human being is G-d's child and that every human life--not just your own--is of infinite value.

Those few who do stand up, risk their own lives to protect those of others, are what we call heroes. They are radically different from the false heroes. The heroes who play for fame and glory are more interested in adventure than service. They are distinguished by the rewards they receive rather than the sacrifices they make.

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