The book the Kite Runner has been at the top of the best seller list for four years now. A friend of mine is in a book club. After reading it they concluded, "Good book, but too coincidental. Those coincidences wouldn't happen."
I couldn't disagree more.
Life is packed full of those moments of fate that launch our destiny, bring our hearts back home, tie our love into a passionate knots, wretch out guts out of their depths of denial to spur courage, guts, tenacity. Call it coincidence. Or call it being a person of heightened awareness who understands every second second on this planet is packed and overflowing - with humor, danger, hope, passions, loss, love and pain.
Only the women whose lives are safe, peaceful, in the lap of suburban luxury have enough security to say, "That wouldn't happen. Life is not that coincidental. Things don't happen like that."
When I read the Kite Runner and I never thought, "That could never happen."
Because it does.
In the book, there is a scene where a man and woman are brutally murdered by the Taliban in Afghanistan on a soccer field, in front of a large audience of soccer fans.
The man in the hole was now a mangled mess of blood and shredded rags. His head slumped forward, chin on chest.
The Al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan want their raping. They want to kill people for being on the internet. For watching television. They want to slice open the veins of good men and bleed the life out of them. And they have. And they do. While Americans are at home saying, "That could never happen." In the grit of Iraq, it is happening.
To keep brutality the winning motto, out on a soccer field, Al Qaeda took an Iraqi leader's son and beheaded him.
Thanks to journalist Michael Yon we have a story of the 'better men' who are making sure that what happened to that man's son and to the many other children in Iraq and also Afghanistan who have met similarly brutal fates, does not become the tragic 'just coincidence' of your every day reality.
Please do read Michael Yon's piece and click through on the names of the men he highlights. You will come to know, Kite Runner is more than an allegory.
The opening page of the Kite Runner the author writes,
"And suddenly Hassan's voice whispered in my head: For you, a thousand times over."
One of our men, LTC Doug Crissman is a very capable and astute leader in thick of Anbar Province, the area where, as Michael Yon writes, Al Qaeda has the "reputation for hiding bombs intended to kill parents in the corpses of dead children they'd gutted." He, and his team, are bringing stability back, one tough moment at a time.
When I read of men and women like him, I think of that sentence in the Kite Runner, "For you a thousand times over". That sentence begins the book. It ends the book. It should begin our day. It should end our day. For men like LTC Crissman, or Rakene Lee, and so many others, when we read of their dedication it's obvious they have that motto, "For you, a thousand times over."
It also reminds me of the contrast, the "other" men and women:
I sat on a park bench near a willow tree. I thought about something Rahim Khan said just before he hung up, almost as an after thought. There is a way to be good again.
Written by an Afghani doctor now famous writer, that sentence grips the Kite Runner reader. From that point forward, you can't let go of the book, "a story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love." (NYT)
Is it the pack of painful circumstances, the pile of our success, our failures that pull our decisions, drag our feet? Do we call those inextricably connected moments of our fate and love merely 'impossible coincidence'? Or do those packs and piles become the calling of us? Of Iraq?
There is a way to be good again.
Today, the lame and weaker men are still at home repeatedly viewing that bunion and corn covered foot on my "Wrong Club" page which, although hilarious to me, can also brings tears when you know the underlying truth of what they are often searching for. We are in a world where child pornographers gross about $20 billion in illegal revenue every year. That total is expected to reach $30 billion by 2009. To put that in perspective, $20 billion is over three times the annual sales of Starbucks. Our culture is visiting a child pornographer more frequently than we do the coffee shop. Maybe we too need to hear our own call in that, "There is a way to be good again."
Yet, there are men out there in the world, working harder than most will ever understand, to keep Al Qaeda off our soccer field, to keep the child pornographer away from your children. And keeping them off is no coincidence. It's due to the hard work of the better men and women on the right team whose hard work, sadly, allows us to be ignorant and claim while sipping latte, "Those events would never happen like that."
We all have a choice. To either realize that destiny calls us through those odd moments of fate, where our hearts run crashing into a story, a person, a child, a lover, a danger and we either answer that call with all its challenges, laughter, hope and pain. And we choose to see the crazy twists of fate that tug at our sleeve and tap our shoulder. Or we dismiss it all as just meaningless coincidence and go back to our shallow loves and lattes. I hope we Americans choose to pack our lives and loves with the former.
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