Would You?

By Sally Bishai

Would you trust someone after they looked you in the eyes and lied (more than once)?

Would you look someone in the eyes and tell a lie, if only to keep someone else’s secret?

Would you hide your cross (or Star of David or whatever) if someone told you to?

Would you tell your best friend if her husband is running around on her–and you saw him with some chick at some shady coffee shop?

Would you tell your best friend that her husband had made a weighty pass at you?

Would you speak up in a room full of people who are in favor of something you’re against?

Would you complain about a pornographic billboard that’s situated near a pre-school?

Would you complain if the explicit content in the billboard showed kids?

Would you be grateful if someone told you the truth–something that you needed to hear–in a way that was less than ideal?

Would you let it go if someone trampled on you in some way that they were likely to repeat, and that you weren’t afraid to confront?

Would you keep it a secret if you’d made a blanket promise to keep a secret… but it was that your friend was going to rob a bank? Or kill himself? Or kill another?

You may be wondering where I’m going with these questions, despite having enjoyed the imagination game they conjured up.

You may have an answer ready for each of them, and you may not care one whit for the bigger issue each represents.

See, I’ve had an especially taxing day.

Not one, not two, but seven separate people have behaved in ways that have sorely tested my promise to God to “be slow to anger.”

Each time it was a shock. Meaning, there was no buildup. It just happened, and broadsided me, hit me between the eyes in the midst of an especially sunny smile I was throwing at no one in particular.

My integrity got called into question today.

Wanna know how?

Well, sir, first I was dissed and dismissed for having made a judgment call about an especially skimpy outfit.

On one hand, my Middle Eastern-ness is to “blame” (thanks be to God) for the modest ideal that had me criticizing a billboard that depicted a girl, dressed in strings, who stared smokily into the camera with “come-hither-for-I-shall-devour-thee” eyes.

On the other hand, my American-ness kicked in, for I fully expected the right to my own opinion, and the right to say my own opinion. After all, I’m no parrot.

After this fracas (which included a diatribe against both Christians and Muslims as “psycho” or “wrong” for having moral absolutes and moral codes—I’m sure you can imagine how I reacted to this), various and sundry unpleasantnesses came my way, but they were more mundane ones.

Until.

The hell of my dreams happened, and a person I was trying hard to trust—a person I’d been warned about from colleagues and underlings alike—betrayed this fledgling trust.

I was proclaimed to have overreacted to this betrayal (finding that this person had looked into my eyes and told the same lie more than once—and recalling that this person had gone out of his or her way to bring up a topic I hadn’t otherwise thought of or even cared about to convince me that what I suspected wasn’t true) and decried as having blown the incident out of proportion.

It wasn’t so much the lie that hurt as the fact that I gave this person a chance—chance after chance, actually—after several people that I trusted implicitly warned me against this person’s pushiness, and told me that this person was a phony, a flake, a fraud, and any number of other shining traits. (A liar, a cling, a psycho, and a user, were their words.)

A final dig I would like to get in (since it was the order of the day) is the fact that the people who consider themselves to be “liberal” are the least liberal people of all.

They want to defend their own “rights” (which generally include something about wanting to obliterate anything that could offend them) whilst propagating the type of lifestyle that would offend most decent and God-fearing people.

If they were truly liberal, they’d say, “Ok, you’re a rabid right-wing fundamentalist, but I’m gonna defend your rights, anyway!”

“Liberals” get mad if someone says “I don’t drink,” but expect people to be happy when they announce that they do.

If liberals were truly liberal, they’d say “to each his own” and live and let live.

They don’t, however, want anyone to speak unless the words spoken are words that they themselves approve of.

A tru(ly) free-thinker must allow for differences of opinion.

If I were to say “Well, I don’t approve of extramarital sex, but that’s a romantic story anyway,” to an unmarried pregnant woman who asked me what I thought of her love story, then that’s liberal thinking.

But telling me that I’m wrong for having such a belief and saying “You’re wrong to be so narrow-minded, you should not have said that!” (making a judgment call on MY judgment call) or even saying “Well, that’s all fine and well, but you should keep your opinion to yourself!” is just errant thinking that is anything but liberal.

Just as they have the right to say wacky things that no one agrees with, so do I.

We should stop thinking solely about who we’re offending (which, theoretically, could be anyone and everyone by anything and everything we do) and live our lives the best we know how, and to the moral standards that we subscribe to, whatever they may be.

It is my belief that the sour face that graces a liberal upon being told “I don’t drink beer” or “Oh, I’m waiting for marriage…” is a function of a (very) deep-seated guilt they may have (but not realize) about their practices.

A man claiming to be a Christian reiterated this, and told me that I shouldn’t impose my beliefs on other people, that I should keep my head down and keep on truckin’. He told me that the best thing to do is keep my faith to myself and to realize that liberals were like this, and that most people in academia were liberals, and that they would punish (where they could) anyone who disagreed with them. (My point there was that people don’t come to America so they can sit there and be quiet! People come here to be free, and I am no different.) Still, I can understand the advice of this friendly man who doesn’t know me all that well.

But if I do, if I look the other way and pretend not to see the people I don’t approve of (not that I’m the grand arbiter, and not that THEY are) doing things I don’t approve of, I will keep looking at the wall, and not be able to look at anyone, or else, I’ll only be able to look at the people who are exactly like me, which would be kind of scary and cultish, if you think about it.

So let’s revisit the questions we discussed at the beginning of today’s program; WHO is the one with the more integrity, the one who does “the right thing” or the one who allows people the opportunity to make their own choice, however wrong it may be?

I don’t know. I can’t say.

All I CAN say is that I’m constantly surprised that life gets HARDER (as I get older and have more experience under my belt) than it could ever be when I was young, stupid, and as green as the Irish grass.

(May God help everyone to not only know their own minds, but may He give them the strength to follow these standards and do the right thing. And we all know what “the right thing” is in my mind..!)

sallybishai.com

Shake Off the Dust… Arise!

by Sally Bishai

How many of you voted in the last U.S. election? How many of you say the Pledge of Allegiance or sing The Star Spangled Banner? How many of you participate in your “civic duties as an American citizen?”

To those of you who do these things, great.

You are—on the outside, anyway—“Proud to be an American, where at least you know you’re free.”

America is great, and it’s given many of us opportunities that we could never have dreamed of back home, although for some of us, America is the only home we’ve ever known.

The Coptic community’s growing presence in the U.S. (as well as other countries) doesn’t change the fact that we owe a debt of gratitude to the native Egyptians who were our forefathers, many of whom bled and died in the name of their—and our— religion.

So what am I getting at, then? Merely this; I wonder just how many of us regularly get involved in our civic duties, not just as Americans, but as Copts?

Even if we’ve never visited Alexandria or Cairo or the Saiid, we carry with us the heritage of cultural perseverance. It’s a genetic code, an invisible blessing, really, that states “Copt, now and forever.”

And with that blessing comes the responsibility of getting involved.

If you have to ask what I mean when I say “get involved,” chances are you aren’t involved enough.

Would it really kill us to write to the occasional congressman, or perhaps join one of the excellent advocacy groups out there? No, it wouldn’t.

But holding off on carrying out these well-intentioned plans could always result in more crimes, or, at least, contribute to the continued trend of quasi-prosecutions against Copt-killers (quasi meaning “a year in jail for killing 20 people,” or something like that).

Remember al-Kosheh? Maybe more involvement prior to the massacre in 2000 may have made it impossible for the tragedy to even occur, or made the laughable two-year jail sentence for the murderers a bit heavier, more suited to the crime.

Then again, maybe not.

Many people consider life as a Copt in Egypt to be a “struggle;” outside observers describe our “plight.”

But I have to wonder what this means to the Coptic youth of today.

Can they picture the hundreds of thousands of blood brothers and sisters that have fallen since Christianity was introduced to Egypt?

Do they know that the stubborn act of clinging to their faith was the only thing that turned these Copts into martyrs?

And do they realize the blatant inequalities that still happen to modern Christians in modern Egypt every day?

Perhaps they don’t.

And maybe they—or you—would disagree.

In fact, you might be one of those who don’t recognize the problems faced by Christians, who cheerfully hold to the belief that Christians and Muslims in Egypt live side-by-side, happy and equal and free.

Happy, maybe. Free, not in a million years.

Equal, not in a billion years.

Because, the fact of the matter is that native Egyptian Christians do not have basic equal or civil rights in their ancestral homeland—the land tended for millennia by our ancestors (although this isn’t an issue of whom Egypt belongs to, it’s more about wanting to live our lives peacefully and equitably).

Even those who don’t acknowledge tragedies such as the al-Kosheh massacre cannot deny the inequality that Copts live with.

Wasn’t it only fifty years ago that “separate but equal” was found to be a great deception?

The U.S. courts had a point.

It is equally true that Copts—of all denominations—live lives in Egypt that may not be “separate,” but can never be called “equal.”

While it isn’t my goal here to outline all of the injustices suffered by Copts (I’m saving that for my next article), it is my intention to engage my younger brothers and sisters—the new generation of Copts—in the discussion.

To force them to wake up and take notice.

To put themselves out there.

To do something.

I’m not saying you should picket Capitol Hill with signs saying “TAKE BACK EGYPT!” and “GO COPTS!.”

I’m not saying you should join every Coptic organization that you hear about (though getting involved in one or several of those is never a bad idea).

Rather, I’m suggesting that the Coptic youth who don’t live in Egypt should educate themselves about what’s going on “back home”—even if that home might only have belonged to their parents, and once upon a time.

Help out where you can, whether it’s in church or in one of the aforementioned organizations.

Write your region’s elected officials, urging them to vocally support indigenous rights and religious freedom in Egypt.

And if you see an opportunity to make a BIG difference—such as running for public office or even teaching Coptic Studies at a university—then go for it.

Your geographic placement outside of Egypt actually gives you far more license to pursue Coptic issues than your cousins back in Cairo.

How much more awareness will come to our cause if we, as Coptic-Americans (or Australians or Europeans or other members of the Diaspora, for that matter), step up to the plate and make a difference in our academic or professional lives, thus drawing the world’s attention to our historically significant community?

It doesn’t matter whether you’re Orthodox, Catholic, or Evangelical (or some vague combination of the three!)—what matters is that you’re Coptic, and the eyes of the world are watching and waiting.

No one can argue with the fact that our forefathers were successful, having pioneered some of the world’s most influential architectural, scientific, religious, and legal achievements.

But perhaps it’s not so well-known that we modern Copts have continued this legacy of excellence by instilling in our children high standards of academic and professional success.

And it’s a certainty that much of the western world does NOT know about the inequalities that happen daily in Egypt.

Isn’t it time that the world acknowledged our perseverance, our success, our struggle?

Isn’t it time that people everywhere realized that we never have—and never will—go quietly into the night?

While some may say that the “first generation” born abroad has grown complacent with Western freedoms and equalities, we can fulfill our debt of gratitude to the martyrs who have struggled on our behalf.

I beseech you, my Coptic brethren—regardless of where you live now—to wake up, shake off the dust, and ARISE!