District 9 Review- "Who is my neighbor?"

Having nothing better to do in Mandeville, I decided to go to the movies to see District 9 today. Without giving away too much of what happens, the plot follows an official tasked with moving a group of some 1 million aliens who have stalled out over Johannesburg and now are living in a ghetto to a site further away from the city. Given the South African setting and the legacy of apartheid there, the implications are very clear, especially considering some of the interviews were actually real people talking about immigrants who had moved into the country looking for work (this, however is not one of those interviews). The movie on the whole was pretty good, though I can't help but think it may have been better if it had been released at some other time than the summer (less explosions, more plot). It also had this weird sometimes documentary style, sometimes not; plot considerations kind of forced this- a fugitive followed around by a camera crew just wouldn't be realistic- but it still comes off a little strange. Putting the movie in South Africa does make the implications pretty obvious, but as the director was from there originally, they can't really be faulted for that.

Throughout the whole movie, I couldn't help but think about Flannery O'Connor's short story "The Displaced Person". In the story, a Polish family is forced to flee their home and are placed on a farm run by a widow. The father of the refugees is a fairly well-educated, hard worker who is nevertheless looked down on by the other white family working on the farm, who eventually come to regard them as lower than the two black workers on the farm (a serious thing in 1960s rural Georgia). Not wanting to give anything away here either (because if you haven't read O'Connor, you need to get your life right, I'll even loan you my book if you want), the Displaced Person is clearly associated with Christ throughout, with one of the characters derisively remarking to a priest that, "Christ was a displaced person." So then who's are neighbor?
Jesus was of course asked this same question and responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan, but if you notice, He doesn't address the question directly. In the end He asks His listeners, "Who was a neighbor to the man that was attacked?" He reframes the question, it shouldn't be "who is my neighbor?" because I am, after all, only responsible to him under the law, but "how do I act like a neighbor to whomever I meet?" So then we are responsible for whomever we can reach and technology and tranportation making that an increasingly wide circle. The hungersite, for instance, allows me to help others across the world just by clicking (if you haven't gone there before, please go now, I promise you don't have to sign up for anything). Various Christian organizations let me sponsor children in other countries for about $30 a month.

These are all great things, and the need is great all over (think about donating a net to help prevent malaria here), but this is not all that we're called to. Neighbors primarily means our actual physical neighbors, you know, people you can actually see and hate (funny G.K. Chesterton quote- "The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.") Not to get all nerdy on you here and throw in another literary reference, in a post about a sci-fi movie no less, but in Dostoevksy's Brothers Karamazov a woman comes in to the monastery asking for advice. She notes that the more she claims to love mankind, the less she loves individual men. And lest we forget, the Nazis, the Soviets, and countless other regimes through the years have killed millions of individual men, women, and children in the name of the good of humanity. The Jews were killed by men who loved their country and were concerned with the public good. The love of humanity is too abstract, lets too many things in, after all, "Isn't it better that one man should perish, than the entire nation?" Once you meet someone, they become your neighbor, you are called to love them, because they too are made in the Image. That said I don't know whether or not space aliens are made in the likeness of God, but let's cross that bridge when we come to it.