It’s pretty common for people in positions of leadership to invoke the metaphor of “family” to suggest a set of relations among a group of people who are not family in the strict sense, but who share some common endeavor or identity.  Often times, this metaphor is invoked during times of crisis or strife within a group to suggest a boundedness that extends beyond the immediate struggles, contention, or grief and into a shared and more peaceful future.  President Obama recently invoked this metaphor in memorial for the three Muslim students who were brutally murdered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  President Obama asserted that in our grief, “we are one America family.”

President Obama’s appeal in invoking the  “one American family” metaphor was certainly aimed at uniting all Americans in the U.S. in grief at the loss and share the outrage at these senseless murders.  And while there is something soothing about hearing our President assert our unitedness in grief and outrage, there is another sense, far less comforting, to which this metaphor aptly applies.  Because, it is true that family members do sometimes murder each other.  Sometimes the meaning of “family,” far from being a term that signals a fundamental love and caring connectedness, instead signals a lack of care or regard.  For many people, family signifies places of violence and abuse, of disregard and spitefulness. And this, too, is part of our “American family.”

The man who murdered Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha was nurtured in a “family” bound less by care and love than by violence and spitefulness.  How can I know this?  I know nothing specifically about this man or his family.  But, I am a member of the “American family,” and this “American family” exists within a world community where we are at war, that at every moment of every day is poised to kill those with whom we are at war, that at every moment at every day makes millions of calculations over the tiniest bits of information that might tell us how to deploy our power to kill and destroy those who we determine to be our enemies.  The “American family” is a violent family, and despite the fact that we can find many places within our “family” that are quite nurturing and loving, our “family” cannot separate itself from the fact that to have a name like Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, or Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha places one in the category that everyone in our family recognizes as those with whom we are at war.

I am not a pacifist, and the inhumanity of the laws and customs sought in ISIS’s “caliphate,” particularly as they relate to girls and women, cannot be allowed to exist freely. The US military is one of the institution that must take on this fight.  The US military is the part of our family that is decidedly capable of violence, and when it is called on it is compelled to use violence.

My point is that in offering the metaphor of an “American family” united in grief, we cannot forget that there are other, far less comforting aspects of this “family” that also unite us.  Whether we “agree” or not with President Obama’s orders taken by our military and intelligence organization in the fight against ISIS, is irrelevant to the fact that this is OUR family from which the killing and destruction are being carried out every moment of every day.  My point is that we like to invoke the idea of family to give ourselves some peace or comfort.  And while I, too, am comforted by such words, if those words allow me to forget the fact that there is more to my family than just that, then in the end I am doing nothing but embracing a willful ignorance that allows my sense of righteousness to dominate even while members of my family are killing, maiming and destroying other human beings.  My willful ignorance does not erase the boundedness I have to our “American family” that is united in our war against “Muslim extremists.”  It is much better if we chose to recognize our condition of war as something essential to our boundedness here, at this time, in 2015.  This is not the kind of boundedness I want within my family, but it is the reality of what we live today.  Examination of that boundedness as it reaches from our most public declarations to our most private feelings must be the call for the day.  Had that kind of examination been at work for this man who coldly murdered three innocent people, perhaps his internal rage would have been tempered by an understanding of the difference between those he killed and those with whom we are at war.  Only then, with this kind of reflective understanding, might we imagine a future where that boundedness can be transformed into something characterized less by war and more by love.

I welcome your comments.