NEW YORK: The US presidential campaign has been waged with unusual vigor and energy from Senators Barak Obama and John McCain, its two main contestants. They have both been very clear in the need to fight terrorism, in not to allow Iran have nuclear weapons and in whom between the two has the best credentials for being Commander in Chief. The word peace, however, has been notably absent from their statements.
The situation reminds me of a visit I made to Lambaréné, in Gabon, where the famous Dr. Albert Schweitzer had carried out his humanitarian work, saving the lives of thousands of patients with total dedication to their health and well being. It is a lesson that we should listen to today.
I was at Cité Soleil, where a community of lepers still lives, created as a special ward next to the hospital. During my visit, three men were sitting on a bench, one of whom was trying to fix a violin, his hands ravaged by disease. I took out my camera and was ready to take his picture when he told me, “Don’t shoot!
Startled by his reaction, I asked him why he didn’t want his picture taken. As he continued working on his violin he told me, “You don’t even bother to say hello, you don’t ask for our permission and you want to take our picture? I apologized, greeted him properly and asked his permission for a photograph. He readily agreed.
That man taught me an important lesson. Although my intention had not been to show him any disrespect, that is what I was essentially doing. I felt I had the right to take his photograph because I thought it was an interesting shot, but I hadn’t respected his right to say no. That he was a leper who had probably encountered much disrespect in the past made my insensitivity even worse.
The man’s assertiveness about his rights and the atmosphere of quiet pride in Cité Soleil, I realized, were no accident. Dr. Schweitzer was remarkable because of his devotion to the needs of those less fortunate. He left a brilliant professional career as a musician and a theologian to become a physician. He then moved to Africa with his wife, built a hospital in Lambaréné from what had been a chicken coop, and devoted his life to treating thousands of patients out of an irrepressible sense of personal duty.
Looking at a herd of hippos in the Ogowe River, close to the hospital, Dr. Schweitzer strengthened his commitment to the need to revere life: “The greatest evil is to destroy life, to injure life, to repress life that is capable of development.
I couldn’t help comparing Dr. Schweitzer’s approach to life to what is happening in today’s world, when we live in what seems to be a permanent state of war and where the reasons for going to war are becoming more and more irrelevant. In today’s world, many times religion is used as an excuse to destroy, not to improve life.
People today speak of a clash of civilizations, when the real clash is the lack of respect for the other, the lack of dialogue, the lack of effort to understand each other. As the American philosopher Sam Keen says in his poem How to Create an Enemy, “.Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed, hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as your own.
Today we desperately need people of Dr. Schweitzer’s stature. We need to follow his philosophy, based on an essential respect for life. As he constantly stressed, the progress of civilization is closely linked to a conception of the importance of life. Only those who say yes to life, to the world in which we live, are capable of making civilization progress.
When we look up in horror to the destruction of a country through a war based on false premises, at the potential destruction of another sovereign nation, and at the decades of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis we need to remember Dr. Schweitzer’s words in a 1963 letter to President John F. Kennedy, “The goal toward which we should direct our sight from now to the farthest future is that we should not let war decide issues that separate nations, but we should always try to find a pacific solution to them.
We will reach that understanding only through dialogue with those who think in different ways from us, when we learn to listen to their concerns and fears. Perhaps then Dr. Schweitzer’s guiding principle will become a reality, “I am life that wants to live, surrounded by life that wants to live.
Dr. Cesar Chelala,a writer on human rights issues, is a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award for an article on human rights. He is the foreign correspondent for the Middle East Times International (Australia).
