Trouble in Tehran

Last night, as I was embracing a wave of nausea and pain—the remnants of a ‘chemo day’—I turned on the news. The top story centered around North Korea’s agreement to ‘pause’ part of its nuclear program in exchange for some quite needed aid from America and several other neighboring countries. The question was posed to Condie Rice, “do you think this will send a clear message to Iran about its uranium enrichment?” Condie felt optimistic that Iran would get the message loud and clear. A few leading scholars seemed to disagree, arguing that Iran doesn’t really seem to be in a place where it’s interested in ‘getting any sort of a message loud and clear.” I’ve been alarmed reading reports over the last week that the Bush Administration may have preparations underway for an air strike on Tehran sometime this spring. The thought takes me back to the morning I was in Takaungu and Mzee Rashid Abdallah, a Muslim, took my hand and showed me on television the razing of Baghdad. There’s a distinct possibility that we could once again be facing a similar collision.

The Bush administration has a tendency to back up most of its policy with the argument that what is happening is ‘necessary.’ If we weren’t playing referee in the Middle East right now, however aggressively, it would open up our country to the threat of attacks from people that, according to the stories, have it in for us come hell or high water. It is a fight, a war that has seemed to leap over the last several years to epic proportions.

I’ve always been dissatisfied with cancer terminology. It’s never settled right. It’s a ‘fight’ against cancer, a ‘struggle.’ Cancer ‘invades’ your body. It’s a ‘disease.’ I wasn’t sure why this rubbed me the wrong way, and being the new man on the cancer band wagon, I didn’t want to upset the tried and true method of dealing with cancer. So it became my ‘fight.’ Yet surprisingly I’m not, in any way shape or form, angry at cancer for entering my life. Granted, I was told early on that this would be a ‘curable’ cancer, if treated aggressively. I’ve never had to accept the fact that the experience would end with death, although I have had to consider the possibility. Still, at this moment I have nothing but gratitude for this experience. It has provided me with the gift of resistance, some serious resistance, but not a battle. My lesson has been learning to look this resistance in the face and smile at it, to realize that rather than trying to ‘destroy me,’ it could actually possibly be giving me something. And it has. So I decided to do something new this round. I’m kind of trying to fall in love with cancer. It was recently Valentine’s Day and I have been given some heavy steroids, but right now cancer feels like that date that went really bad, even though you keep thinking about the guy for weeks after. It feels like the appropriate time to acknowledge, “okay so I got to know you in an awkward situation where I couldn’t appreciate your coolness. So could we just have dinner or coffee or something non-stressful and get to know each other as friends?”

Texan diplomacy never made much sense to me. It’s the aggression behind the actions, it belies a deep suspicion. Backed with a smile, the big guns are pulled out, ‘just to establish whose boss.’ As Americans, spawn of wild westerners, we have a tendency to get riled in the face of resistance. We confront it by girding up our loins and gettin’ ready to rumble. I’m learning that the rumble is self-induced. When you stop looking at the resistance as an enemy, you can actually sit with it as a friendly presence. My strength doesn’t come from a blue painted stripe on the side of my face or bloody arteries popping out of my mouth. My strength comes from my willingness to surrender, to accept and embrace something that is interacting with me, and ultimately to acknowledge that while it will pass through me and interact with me, it doesn’t have to push me off my center. My center will still be there afterwards. And in fact, I may have learned something by getting to know the resistance—as friends first, of course.