Denker: A dangerous start to summer: smoky rain and a terrorist attack amid endless wars

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I grew up learning that in case of fire, you just needed to douse it with water and the fire will go out. But such common-sense rules don’t seem to hold fast anymore in our increasingly upside-down country and world.

This past Tuesday, I woke up to pouring rain and an acrid smell of smoke in the sky as I made breakfast with my two kids for their last week of school. A planned elementary school end-of-year park picnic was moved indoors. Gone was the refreshing, earthy smell of an early summer rain, replaced with something scary and sinister that didn’t dissipate even as the rain continued to fall.

We didn’t have “air quality” indoor recess days when I was growing up in the Midwest. But that was before Canadian wildfires, decimating northern land held sacred to Indigenous peoples, became a regular occurrence. I also don’t remember frequent power outages, but last summer we had to leave our house overnight in at least one lengthy power outage, and again this past Monday night I found myself in the dark in the middle of cooking dinner.

President Donald Trump appealed to the real concerns of everyday moms like myself (especially white, Christian moms like myself) when he won the presidency for the second time last fall. He did masterfully what so many authoritarian-leaning leaders have done before: give credence to the very real sense of anxiety facing many people in a world that is inherently unjust and dangerous, but then make the very prescriptions and policies that will make that world more dangerous and certainly more unjust — thus giving him an excuse in the future to possibly try to remain in power and to weaken democratic norms that support future fair and free elections.

On that smoky, rainy June morning, world headlines bore witness to the same phenomenon of danger and violence perpetuated by the very leaders who promised to bring protection, safety and security (again, especially to those who fit their demographic and racially ideal profile). I was struck by the second day in a row of dueling top headlines related to the ongoing crisis and violence in Israel and Palestine.

You may rightfully say that crisis began in intensity on Oct. 7, 2023, with a violent massacre plotted by Hamas, who still holds more than 50 hostages in Gaza, 20 of whom are believed to be alive. It’s true that in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, many left-wing voices were not vocal enough in condemning antisemitism and recognizing its ongoing role in threats against Jewish people and in rhetoric about the state of Israel itself. Still, it’s also true that the roots of the conflict in Gaza stretch back much further than October 2023, and at the center of recent Israeli politics is the authoritarian-leaning, right-wing leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who, like Trump, has avoided legal consequences by remaining in office.

Among the top domestic headlines this past week included a terrorist attack in Boulder, Colo., perpetrated by an Egyptian national who had overstayed a tourist visa, who plotted the attack for more than a year and said he wanted to “kill all Zionist people,” yelling “Free Palestine” as he hurled Molotov cocktails at marchers in a rally for the remaining hostages. Twelve people were injured in the attack; eight were hospitalized. One of the victims was a Holocaust survivor.

Globally, the top story from Gaza involved multiple days of Israeli soldiers shooting and killing Palestinians at food distribution sites. On Tuesday, the Red Cross and Gaza Health Ministry said 27 people were killed; on Sunday, Palestinian officials said more than 20 people were killed.

The scenes from Gaza are apocalyptic and dystopian: families, children, elderly people, pregnant women whose homes were destroyed, who have been wandering up and down the tiny coastal territory for nearly two years now with no hope of peace or an end to the violence, desperate for food and shelter. Just try to imagine the chaos and agony of clamoring with so many traumatized and demoralized people, all scrambling for a few boxes of food aid with four cans of tuna, some packets of spaghetti and a liter of oil. This in a land the Bible once called a promised land of milk and honey, rich and teeming with sustenance: fish, lemons, olives.

Gaza is far away from Minnesota, and as I read the frantic group text chains for my kids’ youth sports parents, I get the sense that all of us are desperately overwhelmed in our own individual lives, haunted by credit card bills and mounting medical concerns for ourselves, our kids, our parents. We worry about the price of eggs at Target and highway backups with the summer construction and highway closings. How can we imagine what it’s like in Gaza? Or Ukraine? Or even for our neighbors who are living in the streets and can’t escape to clean air indoors on a smoky, rainy day?

I don’t have a cure for what ails us, though I do see some hope in medical workers, like unionized doctors and nurses, who are rising up to say: Something is not right in this country with how we are treating one another. The healers know. As a pastor, part of whose job is to comfort and dwell with those who suffer and grieve, I walk amongst the grief of this violent, dangerous and unsympathetic world every single day.

What I will say is that we must take note of what doesn’t work: the false promises of authoritarian leaders who promise only more danger and violence to supposedly quell what hurts us most. Beware of those who suggest they have all the answers, that if only we give them more money, more power and more guns, they will keep us safe. This applies to religious leaders and pastors, too.

We all worry about our children. Many worry about food dyes and additives and pasteurized milk and fluoride. But the last headline I read Tuesday morning was about a child infected with measles who visited the amusement park at Mall of America, potentially infecting thousands more vulnerable kids, babies, adults and elderly people.

The cures they’re offering us, the false promises, are only making us more at risk and more in danger. We give them more political and governing power at our own peril, risking more summers filled with smoky rain and terrorized gatherings and endless wars.