Jdimytai Damour

We have forgotten about Thanksgiving. How else can we explain the stampeding to death of Jdimytai Damour?

I don’t know anything about Mr. Damour; I don’t know if he was kind or unkind; and I don’t know anything about the people who trampled him; I don’t know if they lapsed or if I should be unsurprised. I don’t really care about blaming anyone for Mr. Damour’s death, although it would be easy to blame the people who trampled him and to not be wrong.

I am more interested in the question, How did these human hearts become hearts of stone? It is one thing to be malicious, to capture people, to blow them up, to shoot them, to decide that one person is worth less than another; but it is something subtly different to be, perhaps, not malicious, but indifferent without margin. At least in our malice we choose to be hurtful. Indifference, however, we gather to ourselves the way a tree gathers fruit to its branches: there is a system in place in the world of which we find ourselves a part – indifference seems to work in us without our knowing.

Unless we fight it. And Christmas, unfortunately, has prepared itself against us. A holiday that, for Christians, should excuse us from “the anxieties of daily life,”* has instead cloaked selfishness in the wool of love; and we are no longer rejoicing with our families if this seeming-love is a burden to us.

There were many factors involved in the tragedy of Mr. Damour’s death and I don’t want to make a simple thing of it. But we can probably sum up the causes into an obvious truth: for a small group of people, for a small amount of time, there was an absence of care -- self-care (not Mr. Damour’s, but the self-care that is absent in the presence of guilt), and care of the fellow. And I cannot shake the feeling that, in some way, if I was ever selfish, or if I ever placated the selfishness of another, I contributed to the culture that led to this man’s death. It is time, therefore, to move forward in simplicity, and to better give of myself with joy.

* “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life, and that day catch you by surprise like a trap.” Luke 21:34.