NIMBY

I was scared and angry last Sunday, two emotions that are more closely connected in our psyche than most would want to acknowledge. I woke up and got the newspaper and a cup of coffee. The dog followed me out and went for her morning romp. Most days she barks at the back door in a few minutes after smelling all the smells in the area and making sure all is as it should be. This morning however her return was delayed. I called and called to no avail. My wife stepped outside and heard a dog yelping and I went to investigate. Our back yard is undeveloped woods and borders on a gravel section of Huffman road. It was along that section that I pinpointed the intermittent yelping and found our dog. She was standing in a torn bag of garbage and fish guts with the plastic pull strap around her neck pinning her to the ground. She was scared and stinky and when I released her she ran in a panic to the house. The day before we had a black bear in our yard, I now knew what attracted it. We left for a trip right after church and it was Wednesday morning before I could dawn rubber gloves and clean up the mess, by then there were four additional smelly garbage bags to dispose of.

I was scared at what might have happened to our dog and how sick she might have become. I was scared at how close she came to strangling herself. I was angry that someone would throw garbage in our back yard and then to assure that it was no accident, to later heap more bags on the same site. Many facets of the incident have been rolling around in my head ever since.

In Genesis 4 we hear the story of the first brothers, Cain and Abel. After Cain killed Abel the Lord came and said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" "I don't know," he replied. "Am I my brother's keeper?"

First it is interesting to note that the first homicide in the Bible is a fratricide. Which begs the question, Biblically speaking is not all killing, from the darkness of the back alleys to antiseptic chambers set aside for lethal injection, the same? Even in Cain’s answer, there is a distancing of the self. Am I my brother’s keeper, whether answered in the affirmative or in the negative, denotes a separation that our quest for rugged individuality perpetuates. Am I my brother’s keeper? The answer is more than a simple “no, you are not your brother’s keeper.” The answer is “No, you are not your brother’s keeper; you are your brother’s Brother, your sister’s Sister.”

In my lifetime there has been a significant shift from “we” to “me.” It is manifest in our housing as we have moved from a walkway to the front porch, to a driveway and a back deck, from getting a hammer and board to fix that hole you stepped in on your neighbor’s porch to going to court to sue for damages. Theologically, Jesus has been changed from the risen Christ who brought salvation to all to my personal savior that I have made a decision to follow thus proving the serpent’s rightness all along that “I” could be a god in charge of my own salvation. Equal rights in Anchorage is only a concern for someone else’s children and the garbage only becomes a problem when it, and the bear it draws in, are in my back yard.

Carl Marx rightly pointed out the flaw of Christian charity. The real Christian task should not be that of just helping the poor with charity; rather it is to ensure for the poor the exercise of those rights whereby they can cease to be poor. The generosity of our giving in this, and many other churches in Anchorage is exemplar, but to acknowledge one another as brother or sister is to see in each act of charity the systemic injustice that perpetuates the need. Without confronting the injustice, the simple act of charity alone is the acknowledgement of the correctness of Carl Marx’s judgment that the perpetuation of that injustice then becomes the permanent fount through which our generosity assuages our guilt.

Rather than condemning the NIMBY’s (Not In My Back Yard) of the world, scripture points to the correctness of that approach and then, as if confronting the expert in the law in each one of us, Jesus points to a definition of neighbor that is beyond our limited geographical understanding (Luke 10). Christ’s understanding of NIMBY acknowledges the bag of fish guts that might have killed my dog as well as well as the poison that is pumped into the air to provide cheep goods for my consumption, the waste from our nuclear plants safely stored away for our children’s children to deal with. Christ’s NIMBY means it is not enough to relish the joy of your daughter’s marriage without allowing others the same joy at the marriage of their child who may love differently than your own. Christ’s NIMBY is to recognize that great health care is not great when it is beyond the affordable reach of some.

So rather than turning my anger outward only, to confront the demon who despoiled my space, I am called by the love of God to confront also the injustice the despoils the lives of the many to whom Jesus points to and says, they too are your neighbor, your brother and your sister. To the victims of injustice, inaction differs little from wrong action. So stand up and say, Not In My Back Yard, then look to the horizon and begin to grasp just how expansive that back yard really is and how many brothers and sisters live therein.