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Last week, I attended a funeral for Yoshio Nakada, a gentle, homeless man who was found beaten to death the day before Christmas.  The senseless brutality of Yoshio’s murder made me think of the millions of needless deaths in places like Darfur and Zimbabwe.  And it made me think of the problems and opportunities Barack Obama faces has he starts his presidency.

Yoshio lived and died on the streets of Washington, DC.  I met him at Grace Episcopal Church, which conducts an active ministry and support program for homeless men and women.  Yoshio came to the U.S. from Japan about six years ago to find work.  How he got here and moved around is somewhat of a mystery, since he communicated primarily by smiles, hand gestures and songs.  His favorite songs, which he sang often in English or Japanese, were “You Are My Sunshine”, “Home on the Range”, and “Where Have All The Flowers Gone”.

Whether or not he was singing, Yoshio heard his own tunes and that music gave him great joy.  By normal standards of behavior he was, I suppose, deranged, but his mental illness took the form of serenity and song that brought instant smiles.  More than 100 people attended his funeral. They were soup kitchen and shelter workers, mental health professionals, police officers, parishioners from the several churches he attended, and other homeless men and women who said that Yoshio’s infectiously sunny attitude and gentility gave them a gift of optimism and hope. The Washington Post captured this attribute of Yoshio when it wrote of his death, one of several unsolved recent murders of street people in Washington.  

According to the police, Yoshio “was found suffering from blunt force trauma to the head” early on the morning of Dec. 24th.  He was in a sleeping bag wrapped in plastic trash bags--hardly a threat to anybody.  

At Yoshio’s funeral, The Rev. John Graham of Grace Church said “it is our shared responsibility to make sure that things like this don’t happen again.”  It is difficult to prevent apparently random and senseless acts of violence of that type that killed Yoshio.  But around the world today, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, there are orchestrated acts of violence that we can do something about.  These include genocide in Darfur, war related deaths in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, attacks against civilians in Israel and Gaza, government caused starvation in Zimbabwe or North Korea, terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and preventable deaths from cholera, malaria, sleeping sickness, polio, HIV/AIDS and other treatable diseases.  

Ending the political, ethnic and religious disputes that trigger this violence is difficult, but not impossible.  In almost all cases we understand the grievances that lead to violence or we could do something about the breakdown of government services that allows starvation or outbreaks of preventable diseases.  It’s also increasingly clear that ending these disputes is not a luxury, but a necessity.  Although we view the death and displacement in Somalia or Colombia, for example, primarily as humanitarian tragedies, they are also security threats.

Barack Obama has always seen the link between wars and humanitarian disasters on the one hand and national security on the other.  “If you start seeing more and more failed states, more and more displaced persons, more and more refugees, all of that becomes a breeding ground for terrorist activity, it becomes a breeding ground for disease, and it creates refugees that put pressure on our own borders,” Sen. Obama said in early 2006.  “In an inter-connected world we can’t insulate ourselves from these tragedies.”

It is easier to grieve the death of somebody who lives among us than to mourn the deaths of the large numbers of people who die needlessly each day half way around the world.  But whether they die brutally on the next block or the next continent, they all live and die in our world.  John Graham’s assertion that “it is our shared responsibility to make sure that things like this don’t happen again” applies equally to the streets of Washington and the trouble spots of the world.

--Ken Bacon