Getting in the middle - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

My father, a 33-year veteran of the Toronto Police Service, when I reached bar-going age, urged me to never attempt to break up a fight alone. The man who gets in the middle of two people hellbent on hurting each other, in his travels, was always the one with a knife in him when the dust settled and everyone backed away.

 

Getting in the middle of a conflict that isn’t yours is fraught with danger, whether you want to believe the above paragraph or not. There are a number of ways it can go wrong, which is why people who grew up in larger city centres than those in Huron County have often mastered the art of, for lack of a better term, minding our own business. If you don’t get involved, you can’t suffer consequences and, furthermore, if you didn’t see anything going wrong, your name never becomes associated with it. You are *sigh of relief* uninvolved.

 

It goes without saying that this isn’t exactly the hero’s path, but rather the path of least resistance. There aren’t many comic books written about caped superheroes who keep kids turning pages by cutting down an alley as someone gets robbed on the street, saving no one but ensuring he gets to live another day.

 

This is all preamble to say that it can be very heroic to get involved in a skirmish that isn’t yours, but avoiding the pitfalls of taking a side.

 

This is different than, say, the United States of America and its - often parodied to hilarious results - role as the police of the world. The U.S., bloodthirsty and always ready for a war, is never afraid of sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong, but, most often with military-led interference. In other words, taking a side.

 

I thought of this the other day when the BBC reported on the Trump administration using an obscure loophole to circumvent Congress and cancel $5 billion in foreign aid programs that were already approved by the aforementioned Congress. Among those programs are U.S. international peacekeeping operations.

 

I first remember hearing about Canadian peacekeepers when personnel was in Rwanda. It was in the mid-1990s, so I was just a kid at that point and I didn’t really understand what a peacekeeper was. I only really understood what a soldier was on this side or that. Now, as a man with a family in an increasingly uncivilized world, I have grown to know and appreciate the role that agencies play in not necessarily taking a side in a conflict, but aiding those who are hurt, displaced and hungry for reasons outside of their control. 

 

With all this being said, let me bring to your attention the work of World Central Kitchen. If you’re not already familiar, chef José Andréas founded World Central Kitchen 15 years ago - first going to Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake - and it’s an organization that you can’t help but envy. While much of the group’s early work came in the wake of natural disasters, in recent years World Central Kitchen has stepped up its efforts in war-torn areas like Ukraine and Gaza. 

 

As of May, World Central Kitchen had served over 130 million meals in Gaza. This figure is destined to be much, much higher by now as Andréas has remained undeterred is his goal of scaling up to provide one million meals per day in Gaza as soon as possible. (Beefing up operations has come at a cost, as seven volunteers have been killed in Ukraine and a further seven have died in Gaza.)

 

The world is lucky to have Andréas and his ilk - people willing to step in, without taking a side, to address basic human needs as sides do so much to dehumanize the other; to be caring in a world that left care behind long ago.