“A plague on both your houses!” So I found myself venting at both Christian and Muslim zealots as I heard the recent news in Afghanistan. In this case, the Montagues were Pastor Terry Jones and his fundamentalist followers who burned a Koran in South Carolina while the Capulets were the fundamentalist Muslims (a crowd exiting a mosque) who attacked and killed United Nations workers in Afghanistan.
I must modify the equation in one way. Terry Jones’s inflammatory poke-a-stick-in-your-eye act didn’t kill anyone. No, as New York Times columnists Roger Cohen notes, he just wanted to “stir the pot.” To which Cohen adds bitterly, “Mission accomplished. Perhaps he’d care to explain himself to the family of Joakim Dungel, a 33-year-old Swede slaughtered at the U.N. mission in Mazar-i-Sharif by Afghans whipped into frenzy through Jones’s folly.”
I hope I don’t have to tell readers not to draw Terry Jones—type conclusions from the massacre. One can no more say that the murdering thugs in Afghanistan are typical Muslims than that, say, Scott Roeder, member of “the Army of God” and killer of abortion doctor George Tiller, is typical of Christian fundamentalists. All of the world’s major religions have too much blood on their hands for any of them to be able to claim moral superiority over the others.
So does the character that delivers the line in Romeo and Juliet provide any insight into the craziness of polarizing religious hatreds? Perhaps Mercutio is like those politicians and media demagogues who pretend to be above the fray while entering fully into it. He may indicate, with his dying words, that he is neither a Montague nor a Capulet–not an extremist–but merely a victim of their feud. Nevertheless he hangs out with the Montagues and participates in their brawls. In fact, he even sabotages Romeo’s peacemaking efforts. Think of him next time you hear someone Muslim-baiting in this country (such as these legislators in Oklahoma) while pretending to be above religious factionalism.
In other words, our Mercutios are those volatile figures who ride the hatred wave of others until it comes back to bite them. They take no responsibility for the violence that ensues. A plague on both your houses, the figure in the play says. As though we didn’t all live in the same house.
Of course, in real life the wave often comes back to bite, not the Mercutios, but people who are entirely innocent.
In Romeo and Juliet, it is not until their own children end up dead that the Montagues and Capulets understand that their hatred is a no-win proposition. In case there is a question about the moral, an authority figure delivers one:
Where be these enemies? Capulet! Montague!
See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love!
And I, for winking at your discords too,
Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punish’d.
To be sure, the Prince hasn’t been very successful heretofore in ending the feud, no more than Barack Obama or the United Nations. And while the Capulets and Montagues may draw life-affirming conclusions from their tragedy, it’s unclear whether the world’s religious bigots will do so. Will people draw back in horror from the slaughter of the innocent U.N. workers? Or will the Montague-Capulet sparring go on and on?
How to end this religious polarization? I’d like to believe that we could turn to the vision of love that is embedded in both Christianity and Islam, but right now twisted fanatics appear to have successfully hijacked the message of their prophets. Is there any doubt that Jesus and Mohammad would be appalled at what is being preached and enacted in their names? “My father’s house has many rooms,” Jesus says. Emphasis on “many.”
How about the sublime love poetry of Romeo and Juliet–does that offer an end to the divide? After all, Shakespeare gives us the story of a blinding hatred and then counters it with two lovers who reach out to each other beyond that hatred. What’s God or Allah? “O, be some other name! What’s in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Shakespeare reminds me to focus on the sweetness of union–we are all divine souls–rather than dwell in bitterness. To be a Romeo reaching out to Tybalt rather than a Mercutio. While I’m fully aware that love poetry cannot stop people from turning to hate–Tybalt could well kill a Romeo who refuses to draw his sword–I also know that the poetry refuses to go away, thereby keeping hope alive.
Better to read a poem than curse the darkness. I retract my vent.
