Small Wonder Read Free

will picture the father quietly lifting the boy from her belly, wrapping him in the soft cloth of his shirt, and reverently leaving the cave of his salvation. Leaving a small pile of acorns outside the lair of this mother, this instrument of Allah’s design, as a sacrament.
    I believe in parables. I navigate life using stories where I find them, and I hold tight to the ones that tell me new kinds of truth. This story of a bear who nursed a child is one to believe in. I believe that the things we dread most can sometimes save us. I am losing faith in such a simple thing as despising an enemy with unequivocal righteousness. A mirror held up to every moral superiority will show its precise mirror image: The terrorist loves his truth as hard as I love mine; he has a mother who looks on her child with the same fierce pride I feel when I look at my own. Someone, somewhere, must wonder how I could love the boys who dropped the bombs that killed the humanitarian-aid workers in Kabul. We are all beasts in this kingdom, we have killed and been killed, and some new time has come to us in which we are called out to find another way to divide the world. Good and evil cannot be all there is.
    Lately we’ve had to consider a new kind of enemy we canhardly bear to behold: a foul hatred bent to the destruction of all things precious to us—to me; I’ll shudder here and speak for myself as someone who loves her life as it is, a woman whose spirit would surely get itself stoned to death if forced to submit to the order of such men. The horrors they’ve wrought have reduced me at times to a pure grief in which I could only cross my arms against my chest and cry out loud. I can’t pretend to understand their aims; I can barely grasp the motives of a person who hits a child, so I surely have no access to the minds of men who could slaughter thousands of innocents and die in the process, or train others to do those things. I presume they want us to become more like themselves: hateful, self-righteous, violent. I expect they would count themselves victorious to see us reduced to panic under their specter, to fall into factions of difference and censor or attack our own minorities, to weaken and let go of the ideals of equality and kindness that first brought our country onto the map of the world. So I hold my own heart fast against the fulfillment of this horrific prophecy, and I hope that the men who constructed it can be made to live out humiliated ends in prison—a punishment that would inspire fewer followers, I think, than dramatic death in battle.
    But even that would not be the end of the story. This new enemy is not a person or a place, it isn’t a country; it is a pure and fearsome ire as widespread as some raw element like fire. I can’t sensibly declare war on fire, or reasonably pretend that it lives in a secret hideout like some comic-book villain, irrationally waiting while my superhero locates it and then drags it out to the thrill of my applause. We try desperately to personify our enemy in this way, and who can blame us? It’s all we know how to do. Declaring war on a fragile human body and then driving the breath from it—that is how enmity has been dispatched for all of time, since God was a child and man was even more of one.
    But now we are faced with something new: an enemy we can’tkill, because it’s a widespread anger so much stronger than physical want that its foot soldiers gladly surrender their lives in its service. We who live in this moment are not its cause—instead, a thousand historic hungers blended to create it—but we are its chosen target: We threaten this hatred, and it grows. We smash the human vessels that contain it, and it doubles in volume like a magical liquid poison and pours itself into many more waiting vessels. We kill its leaders, and they swell to the size of martyrs and heroes, inspiring more martyrs and heroes. This terror now requires of