African Jesus  

                            (credit: Virginia Benedicte; public domain) 

                                           A Hopeful Christmas

Good day. Thank you for dropping by. I have one small announcement: the Chamber of Commerce has asked me to remind you that there are only a few shopping days left till Christmas. Just kidding. I enjoy Christmas shopping like I enjoy drinking bleach.        

        But it’s the meaning of this season, Christmas, that I want to write about today. And I promise to be more serious for the rest of this post.  

What conclusions do we come to if we apply a moral realist view to the cultural phenomenon called “Christmas”? What do I see in the beliefs and customs that surround this man who probably lived from about 4 B.C. to about 33 A.D.? What are we celebrating? What did he stand for? I think more deeply about this question at Christmas time, as most of us do. 

Like many thinkers in Western culture, I get fed up with how commercial Christmas has become. 

The ads sometimes start before Remembrance Day. I find that very hard to take. The men and women who fought in the wars that the nations of the world got drawn into in the last century or so deserve a special time that is set aside just for them. November 11 is supposed to be that day. The rest of us ought to set aside time for them, showing respect and gratitude. Greedy merchants crowding into that time by advertising their Christmas junk infuriate me. I make a quiet vow when I see Christmas ads anytime from Nov. 1 to Nov. 12 to be sure that I do not buy whatever it is those ads are trying to sell – ever again. And in general, we give and receive too much stuff that we don’t need or even like. (“Hello, Little Gift. How long till you’re in the landfill?”)

I don’t like the commercialism that has poisoned Christmas, but I add to that, gluttony and drunkenness. We eat too much food and drink too many kinds of alcohol that we also don’t need or even like.

        Landfill dump (credit: Cezary, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Can anything save me from total disillusionment during the Christmas season? Yes. I couldn’t have said that for many years, but I can today. Ten years or so ago, I figured something out.  

The way of humans on this world for the most part has been to take as much as they can as often and fast as they can. In our era, the philosophy of greed has even begun to threaten what once was taken for granted, namely the ecosystem of this planet. Perhaps in what I have to say today, I can give some hope to those of you who are beginning to despair at the indifference of our leaders toward environmental issues. But my focus will not be on environmental issues because they weren’t issues in Jesus’ time. His main gift to the human race was something else.

The worst consequence of human greed for many centuries of our history on this planet has been the biggest crime, the one that we do to each other. War. When earthquakes or hurricanes hit another land, we grieve for the people there, we send help, and we do what we can. But basically, we can handle natural disasters. The horrors people do to each other are in a different category altogether. A child can tell you that we have more than enough resources on this planet to feed, clothe, and shelter everyone in comfort. Our leaders’ sending us to war is not about making sure that people have enough to live in dignity. Wars are about vain people gaining face. Realizing that fact is what makes us feel so disillusioned with our own species, especially during the Christmas season of "peace on earth, goodwill to men".  

And let me not mince words here. Historians estimate that of the horrors that have happened to people because of the aggression of other people, more than ninety percent have been caused by governments, not by criminals. Wars and genocides. 

Mafia thugs are disgusting human beings, but they are small fry compared to the Hitlers and Stalins of the world. The Shakas, the Genghis Khans, the Caesars, the Alexanders, the Pol Pots, and the Joshuas. The war madness has infected every culture on earth.

Where, then, does Jesus fit in?

War had been ugly and pointless for centuries before Jesus ever came on the scene. Everything any war ever accomplished could have been accomplished without any bloodshed at all, if the people involved had agreed to debate the issues openly, negotiate, and compromise. He saw that. He also saw that the war technologies were improving all the time. Even in 30 A.D., he could see that humanity was on a path of improving weapons till it ended in disaster. Humans appeared to him, even then, to be headed for self-destruction.

The ways of greed, politics, and war and the improvements in our military technologies can be represented by lines on a graph of time. As the two lines climb forward across the graph – as our greed and our technology both keep growing - we watch in horror. We know that inevitably one day the lines will touch. There we will finally make a weapon capable of wiping out the whole human race at the same time as the sea of politics casts up a leader who will use it. There is a kind of paralyzing, mathematical certainty to this graph. Even to Jesus, two thousand years ago, it looked as if we were doomed to someday destroy ourselves. Bigger and bigger weapons, more and more greed. He saw this desperate situation taking shape even in his own time.

But he saw further, and he put into his own time a new way of seeing ourselves. A new worldview. He left us this: love one another as I have loved you. If you remember nothing else that I told you, remember this: love one another as I have loved you. You can do this. You really can. Just love your neighbor. Then all the good you can imagine will follow.  

In the middle of the Roman Empire, Jesus’ time was a time when war and the ways of life that it forced people into were considered obvious. Almost every person in that empire would have thought debating the matter was childish. If you had begun to argue that war might not be necessary, they would have told you, “Oh, grow up!” Most would have looked at you like you had just grown donkey ears. The main thing they all prayed to their gods for was victory in battle.

All the recently conquered peoples in the Roman Empire in Jesus' day contained rebels who were eager to get even with the Roman conquerors. This was especially true of the Jews, the people among whom Jesus had been born and grown to manhood. They had many secret groups plotting sabotage and assassination all the time. 

In this social milieu of jealousy, hate, and violence, people paid to go to arenas all over the Empire and watch men kill each other, right there in front of their eyes. Bloody corpses dragged away at the end. Their worldview was built on the assumption of violence.  

Then Jesus came along and said: “It doesn’t have to be this way. If a man hits you on one cheek, turn the other to him. If he grabs your jacket, give him your shirt. If he forces you to walk a mile with him, walk three.” And he lived his values, all the way to his death. Others had said similar things, but Jesus, by the actions of his life and by the dramatic character of his death, caused people to listen and remember.

Beside that message, everything else he said and everything else that was ever said about him pales to insignificance. 

Since those times, heroes all through history, even modern ones like Gandhi, Mandela, and King, have shown by real-world example that with enough courage, the way of non-violence really can work. Christians have mostly been less sincere in observing Jesus’ simple rule, but they have still gotten gradually kinder every century since Roman times. The horrible “games” of Jesus’ time were abolished in about 300 A.D.. In more modern times, no one goes to bear-baiting anymore, as they did 400 years ago, and people who secretly attend dog fights, once their secret is discovered, are hounded from our midst and quarantined in jails, as unfit to live with. Even then, if they ask sincerely for forgiveness, they can still be forgiven. Jesus gave us that too.

At first, the Romans didn’t consider Jesus’ ideas important. In fact, they thought his ideas were stupid. But well after he was gone, his cult – and a “cult” is what it was to the Romans – kept growing, in spite of hard efforts on the Romans' part to stamp it out. There was something about it that tugged at human emotions. Worst of all, it began to steal some of the sons and daughters of citizens all over the empire, even right in Rome. Many of these converts were teenagers, fed-up with the materialistic, hedonistic emptiness of their parents’ way of life.

The Roman Empire is long gone, as are many other empires. Too many to list. Jesus’ words are still here. Love your neighbor.            

So, for me, was he divine? Was he the son of God that the churches claim he was? No, not to me. Or to be exact, he simply had a lot more of a quality that all of us have, the spiritual quality, the capacity to believe in, and live by, things not seen.

But what matters much more is that he put into the mix of ideas being passed back and forth by the human race, the simple idea that we can solve our differences without killing one another. Thus, he injected a new variable into the equations of human history. If we can learn to love our neighbors, we may make it through the era of greed and war and finally grow up. Emerge as a new, sensible species, a differently programmed species that no longer needs to keep itself fit by programming its young to be their own predators. In short, maybe, we can stop trying to toughen ourselves by war. We can find another way. Learn to keep ourselves strong by individual hard work and self-discipline instead of by killing one another. 

Before him, our destroying ourselves was a mathematical certainty. Then, he inserted a little ‘maybe’. Maybe, we really can learn to love our neighbors.

For me, seeing the truth of that one big principle is more than enough to keep me from cynicism at Christmas time. Christmas, for me, is the time of year when I celebrate the fact that this gentle man entered into the flow of human history in the most warlike society that, up to his time, had ever existed, and changed – everything. He showed us a different way, and he gave us hope. 

So what if some lying, greedy politicians won this latest round of elections? My struggle against them will go on. They can’t stop that as long as there is breath in my body. I have free will and a truth to live by. The rest is up to me.  

Let materialism and greed fill the shopping malls to the roofs with glittering plastic junk. They can’t discourage me. I believe in something real that is beyond all of that. 

We keep trying. We win some and we lose some. The struggle goes on. But there’s hope now. Before this one guy, as I see human history, anyway, there was none.

Merry Christmas, lads and lassies. Enjoy your families and friends.

                            

                                          Nelson Mandela at 19 

                                            (credit: Wikipedia) 

Quote by Marianne Williamson (often used by Nelson Mandela):

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant or talented? Actually, who are you not to be? Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the spiritual glory that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our very presence liberates others.

 

                                 Kennedy's car just after the fatal shot 

                        (credit: Abraham Zapruder, via Wikimedia Commons) 

A Thoughtful Day

Today is a deeply thoughtful day for anyone over 65, almost anywhere on earth. Why do I say so?

On this day sixty years ago, American president John Kennedy was shot dead.

For younger followers of this space, you might consider where you were, whom you were with, and what you were doing on September 11, 2001. That day is called a “landmark” day because everyone over 25 can answer those questions. That day changed everything. But for those of us who are a bit older, November 22, 1963, changed the world even more.

He was only one guy. His supposed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot and killed in the basement of the Dallas Police Department two days later. The guy who shot Oswald was a long-time Mafia associate who was dying of cancer. In a metaphor then, I’ll say the whole event stunk like old fish guts. It still stinks. Too many people who were there were certain one of the shots – probably the fatal one – came from in front of Kennedy’s car. Oswald was positioned way behind it. And there are so many other inconsistencies in the “official” version of what happened that day.

There is film footage of the actual shooting on YouTube if you want to see for yourself. Abraham Zapruder, a citizen of Dallas, was filming the motorcade. He sold his film to the publishers of Time magazine who showed it to the world.

I’m not a conspiracy nut, but I do – like many people all over the world – think there had to be a conspiracy behind those events. If you’re under 65 and you find yourself interested in the controversy, Oliver Stone made a documentary in 2021 on the improbability of the Warren Commission findings. JFK Revisited. It’s on Crave now. The vital scene from Zapruder’s footage is in Stone’s film.   

But why for us old guys was it such a terrible day. Many more died in 9/11. Why does one man’s assassination loom over those who recall?

Because so many good things ended, and so many other bad ones began.

I read a variety of stuff. I’m 74, and no, I’m not senile. Not even a little. I don’t read endlessly about that day or, more generally, about JFK’s life, actions, and words. But, yes, I’ve read about 20 books on that man and that day. Over 60 years, not that many.

Kennedy would have kept the U.S. out of the Vietnam War. I’m as sure of it as one can be about any hypothetical. He was working to do so even then, in 1963. He would have worked more effectively to fix America’s race problem. More than what was later done without him? Yes.

He would have reformed the financial system, likely ended the Federal Reserve.

He would not have gotten “played” for a sucker by the CIA again. The Bay of Pigs fiasco had finished him with trusting that agency. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he also no longer trusted generals. Too many warmongers among them. He’d seen war. Up close. And he knew the buck stopped with him.

He was in charge by late ‘63, he was learning fast, and he was a decent man.

I could go on and on.

Did we learn anything from it? The US got into a lot of foreign wars after that date and supported a lot of corrupt foreign leaders. The civil rights misery goes on, though it is improving slowly. The financial system is beset by ills every few years. Right wing economists claim they’re full of wisdom when markets are booming. The profits are due to their skills which are far beyond the intelligence of the rest of us. But they hide when markets crash. The few still around say no one could have foreseen this latest crash. Successes are due to clever financiers. Failures are beyond human control. Hypocrisy never troubles greed.

Yes, JFK’s father was maybe the worst stock market manipulator ever. But JFK grew out of his father’s influence before he even got to the White House.

Yes, he was promiscuous. So were Thomas Jefferson, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, etc. The list is nearly endless. Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth I of England were promiscuous if anyone wants to begin false comparisons. Leaders often are. Male, female, good or bad. It has nothing to do with their job.

But he was handsome, funny, and brave. (Read PT 109). And so smart. He might even have brought us world peace. I know I was hoping. Nukes haunted us more in those times. But he and Soviet leader Khruschev had begun to really talk.

And I have to describe the larger context. America bankrolled Japan and most of Europe and many other smaller nations in those days. She forgave her biggest enemies, Germany and Japan, and turned them into friends. What nation in history had ever done that? JFK was all the best parts of America for us then.

I was 14, a smart kid, and a prolific reader so, yes, I really did know all of this.

Doug Cameron lives near the school, close enough to go home for lunch. He is standing in the south-east entrance of Hardisty Junior High, telling a circle of hushed teenagers what’s on the radio and tv.  Then, uproar takes over.

A radio channel is on the p.a. I can barely hear it. Other kids are yelling, crying. I start trying classroom doors. Teachers were supposed to lock their rooms at lunch, but a lab is open. I step in. Walter Cronkite tells me President Kennedy is dead. It’s confirmed. I stand very still as something inside me crashes. Tears begin to roll down my face. For a decent man and his wife and kids and the U.S. to the south of me, but even more, at 14, I know it’s the end of innocence for us. It’s the end of believing that sometimes the good guys can win.

A t.v. personality named Dick Clark probably said it best. Someday, we would laugh again. But we would never be young again. For millions of us, the distrust and despair of the modern world began on that day. JFK is dead.

                                          Congressman John F. Kennedy (1947)

                    (credit: US Chamber of Commerce, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

                       

                                                      Renee Zellweger

                    (credit: Berlin_Film_Festival_2009, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                              The Women’s War

I’ve long thought that the idea that all the men of the world should apologize to all the women of the world was silly. I know it was a quote I read somewhere. I can’t find it right now. But I don’t have to look very far to disprove it. I find immoral women in my world, ones who hurt on purpose with no regrets; hurt each other, their men, and their kids. Even become right wing politicians. But there are just as many men as anyone can see. Or some become left wing politicians who learn moral judgement, while unlearning forgiveness.

We are a fallen species, Christianity says. All down here in the mud. And there’s lots of evidence supporting that belief too, for those who wish to promulgate it. But I get weary of the endless recriminations aimed by everyone at everyone. Moral high ground maneuvers. Books on them fill our society. Achieving …what?

For persons of conscience then, is the answer to withdraw from society? Find total humility? Contemplate the mystery of the universe? Meditate hourly? Not for me. I can’t study my navel while my grandchildren’s world goes to ruin.

So I speak up. And as an individual male, not a representative of patriarchy or any other ideology, I sometimes make a mistake and realize I’ve made a mistake and apologize. As one male. Not a representative of any system. Take my lumps. Move on. I keep trying for a life of engagement with my world and its problems because to do otherwise would make me a piece of unwanted tissue in my own eyes. A social skin tag.

So today, I’ll begin from that. And apologize to most of the women of my world.

I repeat that I can’t blanket apologize for patriarchy. I didn’t make it. I work to change it. I want out of it as much as any woman I’ve ever known.

And we do well to remind ourselves that some women don’t. We should never forget Phyllis Schlafly; her adherents number in the millions. They’re out there. Fifty-six percent of white women voters in the U.S. voted for Trump in 2016. I think the explanation is that they grew up in patriarchy. They know how to play its game. They will not let it go easily. The power of cultural conditioning can, as Shakespeare says, shove by justice.

But I do apologize to the women in my life whom I did not properly understand for a long time. Many of them don’t give primacy to the issues of politics and war in their lives. I long believed they should. I see now why they don’t.  

I’ve had circular arguments with some of the women in my life on this subject for a long time. One can’t – I’ve long argued – just ignore politics, and sometimes, the failure of politics which is war. If you don’t deal with war, it will come to deal with you.

But that is not the end of this argument. I thought it was. It’s not.

The brutal truth that old soldiers won’t tell is that they didn’t just see terrible things, they did terrible things. Brutal, horrible things. With their own hands.

But women have hard truths of their own that they don’t want to tell. Especially many of the ones who are still serious contenders in the Make-up Games.

 The women’s main hard truth goes something like this:

“If I and my children and my old mom are driven to the extreme sometime in your hypothetical future …for food and medicine and some temporary security, I’d trade the main thing I have to trade. I know I would. You know what that thing is. And if that hurts your feelings, too bad. When my kids begin to starve, your feelings won’t be on my mind. In fact, that victor with his clean uniform and shiny rifle and full rations pack is going to look pretty good.”

I know now that the women don’t like to say such a truth out loud for a reason similar to the one that silences soldiers who have seen war up close. They don’t want to see the look in your eyes change. The ideal die. 

It's true that some women don’t understand war for what it is. But many do. Older ones who’ve seen its effects on their men, and young ones who are just smart or who have lived by war. Most don’t want to kill anyone. So, if desperate times should come, they know what they would do for the survival of their kids.

In fact, if you want to see what ruthless looks like, kill one of the kids. Wounded American soldiers in Vietnam, lying helpless in a rice paddy, prayed that if they were found by the enemy, that enemy would be male. Then, there’d be a chance that they might be spared. With a female soldier, there was almost none.

Some of this view I learned from two women in my life, and I’ve gradually come to see that it is true, however deflating it may be to male self-esteem. And some of it, I learned from art. Cold Mountain, in particular. It was the defining work of three actors’ careers as far as I’m concerned: Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and most especially, Renee Zellweger. She was just amazing.

But the point of the film, for me, was left to Kidman’s character, Ada Monroe. In voice over narration, at the end of the film, she says:

 

What we have lost will never be returned to us. The land will not heal - too much blood. All we can do is learn from the past and make peace with it.

 

That quote haunts me. The South, whatever its vices, suffered terribly in that war. But the South did go on.

This truth isn’t – as many male novelists in Romantic tones would have it – that the “land” goes on. The land doesn’t care. It’s the moms that go on.

                                                Nicole Kidman 

                                (credit: Georges Biard, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                   Benjamin Netanyahu  

                       (credit: U.S. State Department, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                             Small Town B.C. Characters: Hugh

When I was 14, for two weeks, I visited my aunt who was a nurse in a small, northern British Columbia town. She was a great nurse and she loved me. She never had kids of her own. And I did have fun with some of the neighbor kids.

But the thing I recall most vividly was visiting one of her friends in an even smaller town nearby. About 1963. My aunt talked almost the whole time with her friend. I talked to the woman’s husband who at that time would have been around 45. A truck driver on a local route. Not a long haul driver. Didn’t want to be. Trucking in the mountains in B.C. can be a scary business. What made him interesting to me, however, was when I got him talking about WWII. He’d been and had fought. Over two years. In Italy.

He'd had a few beers, and he had three more while we were there, and he knew he would very likely never see this yappy kid from Alberta again. He loosened up a bit. Or at least that’s what I recall now from that night.

I was – you could say – a nosy kid. I was curious to know how this war that had been so terrible ever got under way. And what did the guys who fought in it think afterward. To be clear, I hated and feared the whole idea of killing another young guy even then. The Vietnam madness had not started to wind up at that point, and even when it did, how many thousand Canadian young men went down to the U.S. to join the American forces is still unclear. (I did know two in later years. But this night was well before the Vietnam time.)

He talked about a few funny incidents in 1943, and he kept opening up a bit more and a bit more right up till we had to leave, at about 11. Near the end of our conversation, I let too much show, I guess. I told him I still didn’t really understand how the WWII madness had got started and most of all, why it had turned so ugly. The memories that he shared with this nosy kid had gotten more and more brutal as the night wore on, though he never actually described the things that he had done with his own hands. I’ve talked in depth to maybe 20 veterans who saw and did real combat over the years; they don’t tell the whole story. They don’t want to see the look in your eyes change. But with 6 or so beers in him, and a kid he had no stake in before him, Hughie got careless.

It's enough for me to say at this point that I realized a scary thing in the last 10 minutes before we left. I still think he was, and still would be, part of a 10% minority, but the truth began to show through.

“Of all the experiences a man can go through in a lifetime, none of them comes even close to being in combat. Every minute is a week when you are out there in the zone and you are trying to kill someone who is trying to kill you. It is such a feeling, such a high. Even the pleasures of your down time are almost as intense because you know, tomorrow you could be dead.”

You see he liked it. Even at 45, he would have gone again if the chance had come up again. Every experience since had been a stupid bore.

I’m paraphrasing his words, but they were pretty close to what I quoted above.

Robert Mitchum says much the same thing in his role as an American general in the mega-production “The Longest Day”. Actually, he says he thinks almost all men who go into combat have some of this madness in them. In fact, he says, until we face what we really are, we aren’t going to even start to solve this madness.

And I admit during the Vietnam days, I almost drove down to Montana and signed up for the U.S. Army. I had bought the Domino Theory. Ah, it was 1969 and I was still a teenager.

What does all of this have to do with my post today? You tell me. 

What do these two men have in common? 

                                                   Ismail Haniyeh 

(credit:   https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:03-03-2020_Ismail_Haniyeh.jpg  )

                                       

 

Teenaged soldier 

(credit: Linda Hess Miller, via Wikimedia Commons) 

This is what the monster is capable of. Capable of, Hell! War loves the young and naive. A few weeks ago, the closest this kid had ever been to Heaven was an unhooked bra strap. He's a lot closer now, but he thinks he's immortal. Death happens to other people. Never mind what nation. Every nation, every war. 

Boys. They're just boys. Wanting to be heroes. Get medals. Win themselves a sweetie who will think they are so brave. 

The veterans want 11 days from now till Nov. 11. Okay? No Christmas decorations. Just remember that whatever you think of their cause, their motives, they fought and died for you. 

Lest we forget. 

(credit: James G. Antal, R. John Vanden Burghe, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                            Something Forty Five Something

 

The women of Berlin

Searched stockyards as the Russian troops closed in

For cow manure still contains some calories, you know

And children have to eat

 

Not boys past twelve, of course

From house to church to school to store

Eight blocks away, they fought

In uniforms all baggy on their skinny limbs

Lugged rifles and grenades in grim despair

Were ripped like gruesome dolls

To guard the Bunker.

 

The women of Berlin

Looked on the even smaller boys

Eyes bright as hope

And shrank from any thought

Of what time held

For boys like these

 

For who would teach them now

How to be men? 

 

                                   Temple Mount/Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem 

                                 (credit: Andrew Shiva, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                          Lunacy: Moon Thinking

I remember I saw a t.v. program about Yasser Arafat in the 1970s. His activities for about a month were closely filmed. Night raids on Israeli towns. Meetings with his officers. And so on. I started watching prepared to just loathe the man. His press in the West was, and is, pretty bad.

He was homely, and he had organized the killing of innocent civilians. But he was an educated man, an engineer, though he had not worked much in his profession. Too busy organizing Palestinians to fight the occupiers, as he called them. He would not say the name "Israel". There was occupied Palestine, but no Israel. 

There were some interviews during the program. I still hated him, but one thing he said stayed with me. He said that to Palestinians, the Jews and their allies were just one more wave of Europeans invading the Palestinian homeland. Crusaders. Most Western scholars admit now that the Crusades were very much a discredit to the West. 

But it was what he said next that scared me. He said that his people might spend two hundred years this time too (the Crusades ran from 1095 to 1295), but in the end, they would kick the invaders out. They would pass the war from father to son. They would never relent as long as there was one Palestinian alive.

On the other hand, I was friends with a man who had worked in the Canadian diplomatic corps as a mid-level diplomat in several countries. His last posting had been to Tel Aviv. A nice guy. Stationed there for about ten years. He had made good friends in Israel, some of whom he still saw in the 1980s. He was absolutely certain the Jews would never leave Israel. After what happened to them during the Second World War, their resolve is diamond hard. Masada will not fall again.

The war between Hamas and Israel is heating up again as I write. Hamas struck first by surprise on October 6, 2023, a week ago. About 1200 Israelis were killed in two hours. Israel retaliated quickly in subsequent days, shelling and bombing the people of Gaza where Hamas leaders hide. Israel quickly evened the score. Israel has also called up over 300,000 reserves and has told residents of Gaza to get out of the north half of the region as an Israeli ground offensive is about to be launched. This is where the situation stands as I write.

The lands that were supposed, by signed treaties, to belong to the Palestinians have been eroded and encroached upon for decades. Jewish settlers are taking them over. Short wars have killed a lot of Palestinians, many more than they have killed of Israelis, for decades. The Palestinians have no planes, no tanks, no big guns, no warships. They fight back however they can.

Three thousand years. But when we go back far enough, that land was occupied by tribes who weren’t Philistines or Hebrews. Some of those original tribes' cities were wiped out to the last man, woman, child, pet, and livestock animal. All that breathed. Those were the orders.

I’m not either party. I don’t have – as Americans say – a dog in this fight. I actually hate the images of dog fighting. But the images coming out of Israel/Palestine now are much uglier. Like Eisenhower, I hate the cruelty, waste, and stupidity of war.

Israel is the only democracy in that area of the world, though even that status has looked shaky in the last few months. But it is a democracy. Governments change there because of elections, not assassinations or hereditary titles.

Back a few decades ago, the Israelis made a going proposition out of a small piece of land that was, for the most part, desert or swamp when they started to come there in big numbers after World War Two. Very hard, but they did it.

That land, in their national story, was promised to them 3000 years ago by God. It was also promised to them by the 1917 Balfour Declaration which came out of Britain, the country with a mandate over that territory. And after losing six million of their people in Europe during World War Two, the Jews were through with trusting any other nation to protect them. They were a people without a land, and they found a land without a people. As their national story goes. 1948. The return. 

On the other hand, the Palestinians had been the big majority on that same land for nearly two thousand years. And, as we have seen, they have no other home. None of the other Arab nations really want them or will take them.

The Torah is not a legal document any more than the Bible, the Koran, the Gita, or any of the other texts of any of the world’s religions. What these texts promise has no secular status. And that land was not Balfour’s land to give away. And if the Jews are owed a homeland, maybe a piece of the Europe that, in so many countries, murdered or betrayed them so shamefully makes more sense. What Palestinians did in WWII is almost nothing. They were thousands of kilometers away, struggling to get by day to day, as they had for centuries.

A mess. Insoluble, many claim.

It’s why, since I was a boy and a youth in the 1950s and 60s, this one will not settle, will not resolve. Many other hotspots have worked it out, fought it out, or both and settled in my lifetime. Not this one.

Which brings me to a very moral realist bottom line.

This mess could be worked out over a couple of decades by getting the kids on both sides to learn in the same classes in the same public schools that those “Others” are just people. Like they are. The world could gradually come to a time in which we lived together in peace under one set of laws, democratically created in one giant system, enforced in one set of courts using one set of rules, governing one pluralistic, tolerant species. Integrate the schools. That's it. 

No one tribe was chosen by God, though in many parts of the world, people still claim they were. Jews in some parts of the world, Muslims in others, Hindus in others, Christians in still others. The word "Innu" means “the people”. "Masai" means “the people”. Tribalism goes on in nations everywhere. But we are all His children. He really would like us to live together and get along. In my view, anyway.

So? Teach the kids, by precept and example, a few simple clear lessons. The rule of law, laws democratically created and regularly updated. No autocrats or theocrats. Just thoughtful, tolerant people, governing themselves, but also free to worship openly in their own way.

And yes, I’ve had lots of people tell me that I dream an impossible dream. To that claim, I reply in two ways.

First, we have changed some deeply ingrained behaviors before. Gladiators killing each other for spectators’ entertainment is virtually gone. Slavery. Even whipping kids is on its way out. We could change this unnecessary military nonsense if the kids just went to secular schools together for as little as one generation.

And second, in reply to those who call me a dreamer, I say: look at it. The bodies. Screaming children. Bombs exploding. Nuclear holocaust lurking just over the horizon. Look. Do you like this stuff? Then, what do you suggest?  

Finally, I will close by asking this: That forest of mushroom clouds that is lurking just over the horizon. After 3000 years, the obfuscation and bafflegab run out. Do you want that scenario or not? 

                                              Palestinian  boy and Israeli boy 

                                                   (credit: Debbi Cooper)