On Sunday, October 8 I had an opinion. My viewpoint was published in the October 20 edition of Hudson Valley One. On Sunday, October 29, I was asked: “How did what is going on in the Middle East start?” I don’t know. Wars start.
The earliest rock carvings of armies at war date to 3500 BCE. That was a long time ago. Progress has happened, not in peace, but in weaponry.
Today, I have a vacillating emotionally driven point-of-view jumbled and jumping from one extreme to another depending on who is commentating at any given moment on television.
A voice, sounding neutral, forthright and believable, with an English accent speaks during a paid-for TV advertisement, “It’s important to keep the facts. Hamas keeps the Palestinians in harm’s way, steals their food and water, sends them into the war zones, uses them as human shields. Hamas is both the enemy of Israel and the Palestinians.”
Is that the truth? The UN has not substantiated those accusations. What seems to be true from the coverage since October 7 is the receding public interest in the original attack, the shocking callous cruelties that left innocent Israelis, Arab Bedouins and young people from all over the world dead, as a result of atrocious acts of barbarism.
The good-looking newscasters are artfully presented with perfectly coiffed hair, high-end tasteful clothes and calm demeanors juxtaposed against continuous pictures of heinous carnage. “Warning, the pictures are graphic. Don’t watch if you cannot handle it.” Yet, we watch, global rubbernecking of cosmic proportions.
The innocent child still alive in us, motivated by “our better angels” wants to dissolve into the small TV screen and halt the destruction. We cannot. So out of the need to survive, we protect ourselves. Panic, fear, anxiety, predicting the worse only causes self-harm and solves nothing, so we go about our business, intermittently remembering and forgetting the calamity.
If only we could figure out which side is committing the greatest evil. Can we differentiate between acts of murderous depravity and massive numbers of innocent dead and discern which is worse? We debate what is legal and what isn’t as if that matters to the suffering victims.
If we could know for sure who are the bad guys and the good guys, that might bring some solace. With each day guilt and blame mounts up on all sides of the conflict like an invisible barrier obscuring any possibility to see the truth.
With all the man-made tragedy and the lack of compassion toward each other, I don’t understand man’s inhumanity to man. Once I was told by a teacher to inwardly repeat the phase: “And this too is human,” when I encountered the causes of warfare: hate, jealously, territoriality, one-upmanship, entitlement and dehumanization of one group towards another. Hurting each other is way too human. Killing each other is ubiquitous here on our tiny corner of the universe.
I spent last weekend observing interactions between two year olds. It was all there: aggression, jealousy, territoriality and the need to prevail in power struggles over toys, parental attention and turf.
The toddlers screamed at each other, became frightened and sad, started to cry. Then the mothers responded; finding a solution to the conflict.
The mother’s scooped their little ones into an embrace, softly talked without judgment about love, sharing, kindness. Each mother whispered the rules of engagement governing human interactions. You cannot grab, hit, or push. “Now give each other a hug.”
I have a recurring ludicrous fantasy. A great mother space ship comes here from another planet, one that has survived technology and found the path to peace. The spacecraft lands on our small blue marble, scoops us humans into a loving embrace and teaches us how to get along.
Join the family! 
