Wrong color, wrong team

Chrysanthemums purchased yesterday.

I was kinda excited about this, because while I lived in an apartment (my entire adult life until five years ago), it didn’t seem like there was any point, and then, after I moved back home, dad had specific opinions about purchased flowers and plants (“foolishness” — or “Quatsch,” as his mother would have said). So it may seem silly that I waited until I was in my fifties to do something other people do as a matter of course, but I was pretty excited! Until my next-door neighbor came by — she’s actually very nice — to tell me that my mums were the wrong color. For my house to fit in, she was insistent that I need to purchase yellow mums. I listened to her and smiled (“Wisconsin nice”) and eventually she went away. When I drove out this morning I did look at everyone else’s mums and indeed, they are yellow, orange, and white.

This is a common sort of problem for me — in many cases, I have not been blessed with knowing the typical correct responses to things that are shared among others. And I’m not usually the “go along to get along” type with anything that I consider important. That is to say: you might say I don’t instinctively know the typical correct decisions because I’ve never cared.

Mums aren’t important. (Except in Texas, where “mums” are important.) I’ve moved into a suburb, though, where conformity is. However, I’m not going to buy any more mums, so it’s these mums or no mums, and I picked these because I like them.

In the last ten days, roughly 8,000 refugees from Afghanistan have arrived at a nearby US Army base. (If you’re from the Upper Midwest, you know why I cringe at calling people “Afghans.”) Under-occupied as I currently am, and relatively open-minded on the refugee question, I thought I should get involved in the relief effort. Unfortunately, the local agency charged with refugee resettlement is Christian. This wouldn’t be so bad, as I’m not per se hostile to Christianity, and I still occasionally teach Christian theology, but the application to participate involves four questions about my relationship with a Christian congregation and Christianity more generally. I’d forgotten this detail, but I had looked into this several years ago when there were refugees from Somalia settling here and had been dismayed.

There are going to be a lot more Afghan refugees here now than Somalians back then. More even than the initial resettlement of Hmong people here in the 1980s, which caused so much uproar.

Theoretically, they don’t require volunteers to be Christian, only to “personally affirm” or agree that they can “work alongside” their “values,” but it’s quite off-putting, as they want volunteers to follow the example of Jesus. (I’m not planning to be crucified and die for the sins of the world, either literally or metaphorically, any time soon.)

I looked it up and 99 percent of the population of Afghanistan is Muslim (Sunni or Shi’ite), with a vanishingly small percentage (<1 percent) of “other.” Normally, if a Muslim moved here, I’d offer to put them in contact with the local groups. There are three mosques within easy driving distance. Two are Sunni. One is Ahmadi and opened its doors to let students shelter during a school shooting a few years ago. In this case, though, I personally would be stepped back about religion, given the likelihood that these refugees in particular might be members of Muslim minorities, or secular in orientation, or just maybe tired of thirty years of conflict over the desire of some people in Afghanistan to live in a theocracy. And I sure wouldn’t be engaging in Christian mission to them. Geez.

Interestingly, the local agency has also not yet published a call for volunteers (in contrast to Madison and Milwaukee, which are already hard at work on this task). In those cities, Jewish Social Services is involved in resettlement efforts with other groups. Of course, we don’t have Jewish Social Services here. So maybe the plan is not for them to resettle here.

It’s a puzzle. In the end I’m on the wrong team again. But only kind of.

Two years ago I joined a food co-op operated by a small group of US military veterans (mostly for the food, because I also want to support veteran efforts more generally — won’t get into the reasons here.) It turns out that they are now trying to get two families out of Afghanistan whose members worked with these veterans when they were deployed several years ago. The goal is to get them out (!) and then resettle them here.

So I’m getting involved with that. Right now it only involved writing a check. But I hope it can turn into more.

The military is also a team I’m not on.

Boy, this was a weird ramble. Rosh Hashanah starts tonight. Happy New Year and May You Be Sealed in the Book of Life for a Good New Year to those who celebrate. I will catch you on the flip side.

~ by Servetus on September 6, 2021.