Was it at a workshop? Or did I read about it? Maybe I saw a YouTube video. Possibly someone just told me. All I remember is the demonstration, the ensuing lesson.
Two decks of cards were thrown into the air. The time it took for the cards to land on the ground was less than four seconds. Afterward, the facilitator chose a participant to gather the cards and sort them by number and suit. Again, the procedure was timed. To toss the decks into disarray, four seconds. To put back in order, 420 seconds.
It takes only a few seconds for destruction to occur, unlike the fixing which takes tenacity, attention and time. Is this a law of the universe? Chaos and entropy happen ubiquitously and the aftermath, the healing, is a painstaking lengthy endeavor.
A car accident takes place in seconds. The resultant consequences can take years to overcome or maybe never.
In a moment of passion, a parent hits their child with an implement.
For the rest of that child’s life the emotional scars remain.
It only took a second, last March for me to lose my balance, fall and fracture a vertebra. The hospital stay and then the recovery lasted for months.
Now there are two wars, destruction happening hundreds of times per second, each minute with consequences beyond all imagining. Incomprehensible pain and suffering of innocence for generations to come, maybe forever.
“They” say older people become more conservative. Not true. With age, too much has been witnessed. Age muddies the waters between good and evil, righteous and sinful, good guys and bad guys. Time shows us any group of people from any country believing in any religion or none at all, has within it human beings who are moral and those who are not.
A friend of mine told me “I lost my edge” when this column, in his words, became too “kumbaya,” which is defined by the belief in the basic goodness of humanity and the optimistic view everything will turn out right in the long run.
I do not have confidence all will wind up well on this compromised planet. I just choose to trust it will. It’s an act of defiance.
Since the war began between Israel and Hamas, I have received messages and phone calls from people who were sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. Their messages are full of words showing a shift in their opinions: rethinking, confused, unsure, misled, unclear, disturbed.
It is good to change assessments when new information is available, but then other new information will shift perspectives again.
Points of view are formless. They have no weight, like trying to grab smoke and keep the ephemeral substance locked in a tight fist. Facts are changing, are always flowing.
Strongly held judgments are like the deck of cards and can separate us from one another. My friend threw these words at me in a minute, “America is responsible for everything wrong on the planet. World democracy must and will be toppled.” In that instant our friendship, a 30-year friendship, was injured.
On a massive, incomprehensible scale, the wars between Israel and Hamas, Russia and Ukraine, are threats to the global environment. Its people, who have within their power cataclysmic weapons that can obliterate whole villages, towns and cities, annihilating thousands of people in a split second.
At the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem there is an exhibit entitled “Righteous Among Nations,” honoring German soldiers and German citizens who risked their lives to save Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, dissidents and the disabled, all victims of the Holocaust. Those were acts of individual courage. Everything depends on each individual person’s consciousness.
There are isolated individuals from all persuasions who will act kindly in secret, against the tirade of hatred that turns the blood of human beings to grey dust.
The terrorism happening now is evil. Violence is always wrong. There are situations where there is no moral equivalency. Like this one. We need to respond. How?
We can be part of the lengthy effort needed to begin to heal the massive task of repairing the world by donating to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Red Cross provides lifesaving medical care on both sides of the Gaza border. The Red Cross network covers both the Magen David Adom ambulance network in Israel and the Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance network, with staff working round the clock to treat casualties and provide urgent humanitarian assistance to all the victims of the present conflict.
Eli Weisel has espoused for decades that the opposite of evil, of violence, and mayhem is apathy and indifference. Everything depends on each person’s individual consciousness. It is an act of defiance to believe everything will turn out well. That defiance needs to be transmitted into actions.
What can one individual do? Nothing is not the answer.
Join the family! 
