I've been watching Tea with Mussolini in stages lately, turning it off when I feel the tension rising so much that it might keep me awake. The first interval I turned off as the boy departed for school in Austria as the seeds of trouble were just beginning to sprout. The second interval is the one that interests me right now, though; my second interval ended when Judy Dench's character has her dog wrenched away.
Now that scene in reality would have been much worse; no doubt the soldiers would have killed the dog in some horrible way, as if it were fun for them. At best one of them would have kept it till the van was out of sight. Certainly, the boy would not have easily have had it held in his arms. But the movie was kind, and the boy ends up holding the dog.
I watched long enough to see his cart following the van through the countryside. But that was it. By then I was too tense to sleep, and thus ended up in this quandary.
Why does the suffering of a dumb animal matter more sometimes than the suffering of people?
There is a saying that Indians had about the British in India, that seeing a starving beggar and a starving dog, the Englishman would pity the dog.
I've always loved dogs, as far back as I can remember. The first death I experienced was the death of our dog Trouble when I was in third or fourth grade. Trouble's death was much closer than the death of our great-grandmother. This is logical, of course, in that Trouble was a real part of our lives and loved us back. Great-grandmother seemed to be neither of these. Children blessed with circumstances like mine--a stable universe orbiting around a happy, healthy family--don't have to experience anything much worse than the death of a pet. That is our first encounter with death and suffering. It's quite logical.
And as I grew up, taught principles of Christian love by family and church, I gradually learned a bit about what it means to love people. First there was JFK's funeral on TV. I was overwhlemed by the national sense of grief and cried and cried. My mother probably began to monitor how much of the proceedings I watched. That was in high school. It wasn't until I was in seminary that I was hit by a more personal grief, when Paul Clark, the father of a family that I was close to, died suddenly one Sunday morning. I grieved greatly for the family. It was the first time the death of a person I knew touched me deeply. As Dylan Thomas puts it, "After the first death, there is no other." That is, after that first experience, like the first experience of anything, the later ones are not so painful (or exciting, or whatever the "first" is about).
Not long after that, my grandfather died, and his death, too, got to me. I suppose I had passed another initiation rite of adulthood: the death of people could be as harsh as the death of a dog.
Further stages have come along. Through the teaching and example of seminary professors and others, I've learned to grieve over the suffering of strangers. Lord willing, if I have any enemies, I would grieve over their suffering, too. I've a long way to go.
But while watching Tea with Mussolini, it was back to the dog days. I still love dogs, and I still can't stand to see them suffer, even in a fiction. But I can't stand to see people suffer, either, even in a fiction. When a movie turns cruel to people, I turn that off, too.
The thing about the dog is its helplessness. Adult people are not helpless. The ladies being loaded onto the van in the movie are human beings who in some sense are responsible for their own situation. They also have each other to rely on, and they have the ability to hope, the ability that humans almost always manage to find in even the worst situations.
The dog doesn't have any of that, or doesn't seem to, anyway. To the foolish viewer like me, the dog is totally at the mercy of the situation. Wrenched from its owner, the one who has fed it and taken total care of it its whole life, the dog is bound to be confused and sad and--hungry. Who will feed it next? It touches me.
The suffering of anything is a terrible thing, the result of sin and the Fall. I'll do what I can to allay the suffering of anything, including ants, to some extent, but there is something amiss if I let the suffering of a dog take precedence over the suffering of people. The people, too, may be at the mercy of the situation. Who will feed them next?
