A synopsis of Dr. Tutu's remarks from his keynote address Occupation is Oppression, given in Boston at the Ending the Occupation conference on April 13, 2002, can be found at the Guardian.  Also check out this article in The Christian Science Monitor.

Israel's demonstrated arrogance and disrespect for international law is tantamount to an admission of guilt.  What is it that the US does not want to see here, since we seem to be ignoring the blatantly obvious?  Are we in denial that the US favorite in the Middle East has become a monster?  If they were strangling the flow of oil to the West, instead of strangling the life out of an insignificant nation, there would already be US troops in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. 

The truth is that we do not care if Israel commits war crimes against Palestinians. 

Tell me please, once again, what exactly it is that makes these children evil.  Objectively speaking, I think it is grossly unreasonable of us to expect that these children will do nothing during their short lives in response to these injustices. 

If we want to continue to do nothing about the crimes committed against them, we should by the same token do nothing about the crimes that they commit.  This is absurd, to be sure, but it is certainly less absurd than what we do currently: cultivate for only one group of people the humane compassion that is rightly deserved by all people.

generating page(s)...

Look familiar? 

I hate to complain (no, that's a big lie, I love to complain, so here goes...).  I've been watching the above little graphic for an hour.  And during that time I waxed reflective about the magic of push-button publishing.  You see, Blogger has several (at least) major pieces behind the magic.  For example, there is one piece which keeps a database with all my precious irreplaceable pearls of wisdom.  This is where they go when I push the 'Post' button.  There is another piece that takes those posts from the database and transfers them to my web-server, which was originally the most fascinating aspect of Blogger for me.  It was cool to do something on a blogger web page, and have the results emerge on my website. 

That's the gimick that got me hooked, and before long, I was assimilated into the blogger community.  However, as I am wont to do from time to time, my affections eventually wandered; I began seeing Greymatter in furtive little trysts, and adolescent explorations.  We met in the safe and hidden confines fo my webserver, ftp-ing the nights away.  I revealed nothing to my faithful friend, blogger.  But it didn't work out.  Greymatter is one hot piece, (of software), but things got complicated, and I guess I wasn't in it for the long haul.  The mysterious ones are the most attractive, but they require the greatest committment.  I just wasn't at that place with gm.  Except for just one more fling I had with gm, it has been blogger and me for the past two years.

It wasn't really one thing only that led to this.  It never is.  There's a malaise, a general lack of novelty, a challenge, passion, and payoff that is just not there anymore like there was when me and blogger began.  It's not actually over yet.  Though I no longer love blogger we are, you might say, still co-habitating.  But I am seeing another program.

MovableType, apart from having a cool name, isn't 'out there' as much as blogger; he stays home, on my server.  He's more accessible than Greymatter.  He does it for me.  With blogger, depending on what interface I am using—editBlog page, the blogThis popup, or the API products, to name a few—there is at least two servers involved in that process apart from mine, more likely there is a chain of blogger servers, any of which can (and do) go down from time to time.  And when a server goes down on me, it is nothing like when that happens in a human relationship.  It does NOT make me happy.  It really comes down to simple logic (don't we always say that when we are about to break someone's heart?).  The fewer opportunities for failure between me and a published page, then the more likely I can publish when I want to. 

If, or when, I finally do leave blogger, those will be my reasons.  I will miss the tempermental servers; I have grown kinda fond of their antics.  And I will miss the connection to the blogger community, though that will turn out to be, I think, less of a loss than I now anticipate.  I won't be gone and neither will they, but still, moving-on is hard.  And if there is any consistency to my fate, once it is over for good I will realize like a hundred times before that I was nuts to leave, and that it was the best thing I ever had.

It is truly cuckie here.  Cold like winter, and wet, well, ...like winter.  Isn't this after easter already?  I mean, didn't I see pastel bonnets weeks ago?  I know I saw bonnets...  It. Is. Not. Supposed. To. Be. Cuckie. At. The. End. Of. April.  (!)  Jeesh.

And this bronchitis...  I try to take a nap, and with every exhalation, I hear at the very end, tiny old men, in my chest—hundreds of them—making little tiny screams and moans.  They sound so sad.

I can't even focus on a blog entry.  I sat down hours ago to record the tremendously insignificant events of my day.  A simple task.  Instead, I ended-up with that flag rant!  It was like, my scanner just d-r-e-w my face to its glassine surface—and to the impossibly bright light thereunder—as inevitably as gravity draws a meteor to its brilliant demise.

So, I went to my bankruptcy hearing today.  It is called a 'meeting of creditors.'.  It seems to me that there are never any creditors at these things.  There were at least five bankruptcies being processed in the hour that I was there, and not one creditor.  Not that I am complaining.  But I wish I knew that earlier.  I was a wreck worrying.

It's a slick process.  One guy from the US Bankruptcy Court, the Trustee, is there sitting in the front of a big room at a huge table.  He has a tape recorder, and a cell phone.  He asks if you have read this or that form, and asks if you understand it.  He does this for about a dozen forms.  One scary thing: He asks if you have read the notice on the door of the hearing room, and do you understand it.  That notice, in giant red letters, says something about firearms and weapons not being allowed in the hearing room.  I don't know what I would have done with my sawed-off had I inadvertantly brought it.  There's no court officers, and just this little guy at a big table with a cell phone.  I wonder if getting you on tape saying that you have read and understood the firearms prohibition somehow makes you more culpable than if you just walked in and blew someones head off without making any such statement. 

He then rattles through a pro-forma interrogation of the petitioner, and schedules the case for discharge of debts two months later.  There's no robes, and not even many suits.  It was scheduled at 10:30 AM.  I woke up sick as hell, crawled there, sat waiting for my lawyer, and trying to keep quiet the old-man chorus in my chest.  My lawyer was representing three of the five petitioners at the 10:30 session.  Bankruptcy law is apparently a brisk business. 

I walked home, changed clothes, and shivering, I put on my little cap and sat down to write a simple blog entry.

This is my answer to all the blind American nationalism.  I have nothing against generic nationalism, the gentle kind, sans bloodlust.  But blind nationalism ala USA says I'm better than you because I'm an American.  I find that nauseatingly juvenile.  Maybe I'm just being contrary, I mean, some of those cheap, shredded, filthy plastic flags that hang pathetically off nearly every car antenna were put there by moderately well-intentioned people.  Placed with the same ubiquity and 'mindfulness' as the antenna standard are the flag bumper stickers and flag window decals, which number at least twice the population of this country.  Where is the nationalism in flying a disgracefully neglected, dirty, torn US flag—as do most of the businesses where I live?  It seems everybody wants to appear patriotic; perhaps this obsession with patriotic appearances is ebbing.  One can only hope.

Maybe it is just a matter of taste, but I am gagging on the overstatement.  This flag saturation is pernicious; it seems to implement the particurlarly emetic slogan of George Bush, "You're either with us or you're against us," implying that my choices are to be either an American, or a terrorist.  It implies that I, flagless, possess suspicious intent, questionable patriotism, and perhaps I even have treasonable designs.  As a mere mark to signify one's concurrence with the prevailing tribal mood, I suppose it works.  But this mindless flag-plastering fails miserably to promote anything, least of all the flag.  The US flag symbolizes a living nation that has historically defended the individual's freedom to act contrary to the majority's sentiment; it represents a brave nation that more often than not, and at grave cost, has sought justice; and despite everything, the United States flag flies over a young nation that once made a revolutionary assertion to the world: human rights preempt state's rights.  The flag represents things about my country which I describe now more with hope they might resume, rather than assurance that they persist.

These US flags, in their proliferation, seem to represent something warlike, inhumane and divisive.  I won't sport one.  I'm not with you, Mr. Bush.  But I am not against America. 

Hi. 

Hello.  So, you're going back to work today?

Yup.  It's hard to go back, after so many days off, but it's only for today.  Then I work Tuesday and I'm off again Wednesday.

They'll want you to work OT on those days off.  Everybody is sick, the place is falling apart...

No.  I'll Just say no.  I may be going back, but I am still sick.  Hell, I was wheezing and gurgling and coughing constantly; I couldn't even breath enough to keep my lips from turning blue two days ago.

You thought you were going to die, didn't you. 

Yah.

You're still scared of it, dying I mean.

Hell, I could die any minute.  I just don't want to die not being able to breathe.

You just don't want to die.  And it's not because you want to live, it's because you're scared to die.

Well, ...yah.

Work on that.  It's no way to live life.

Yah, I know.  Hey thanks, I gotta go.  See ya,
joe.

This line was tagged onto the very end of an article in The Guardian. 

Say what you like; it was accidental, the boys shouldn't have been where they could get killed, or children can be suicide bombers, too.  Select whichever line suits your audience.  The fact is that young men and boys are the targets in Israel's crusade to dominate Palestine.  Especially boys.  Israel has been cultivating a taste for homicidal rage within the ranks of its military for decades, and it is using those killers now to quash any base for future dissent from or resistance to their almighty will.  Why is it virtually always Palestinian boys that are killed this way?  I don't know why the girls are not savored targets, as are the boys, but I suspect in the Israeli military's cold calculations, the girls don't count as much. 

Apart from and exceeding the outrageousness of Israel's boy-murder spree, is this world's blasé lack of interest in the news of such atrocities.  Sure, Baby Bush is calling for an investigation into the alleged crimes at Jenin.  Big deal.  His call is disingenuous; Bush seeks only to rehabilitate the image of his most significant ally in the Middle East.  And I fully expect the investigation will distribute the blame (if any) not based on real proof or the real culpability of the parties, but instead will dole out the blame in exact inverse proportion to the amount of power each party holds.  The powerless Palestinians will be blamed the most for the Jenin massacre; the hot headed Israeli's will get a little blame; and the Americans, of course, will get none.

And after all the posturing, theatrical incredulity, and histrionics, we tack on to the end of the story, almost as an insignificant aside, they murdered two more little boys.  And now for the weather...

It is all business as usual, imperial egos, money and power.  And though it feels like it will never change, it will.  Indeed it will.  Not in our current lifetimes, certainly, but when humankind grows-up a little more, and a little more, and a little more, things will be better.  I understand well the despair and rage of suffering beneath cavalier cruelty and breathtaking injustice.  And when facing one's own destruction at the hands of another, ignored by a world that apparently could care less, I know how tempting and seductive it is to choose to go out in a blaze—or an explosion, taking some of that world along—rather than die quietly. 

I don't know what part is played by such outrageous passions in the growing-up of the world; and it is not our place to know.  But it is our place to care, and care deeply, tearfully.  We should not ignore our anguish at these events—but I believe we will.  Until another life.

Woke up feeling pretty good, thought the bactrim the doc gave me yesterday was kinda miraculous.  When I went to work it all came back, so I stayed for an hour gurgling and coughing incessantly, then came home.  Ate.  Slept, a little.  Spent hours reading the archives of reX.'s raMbles..., and now I am here.

I love reX.

The chest cold, now anchored firmly in place, is beginning to take the defensive and no longer commandeers every breath I take.  As its tribute, it now demands only two or three minutes of uncontrollable coughing out of every hour, instead of the 20-minute episodes it demanded yesterday.  My head, however, is behaving somewhat like a baggie full of jello with great globs flopping either this way or that, depending, I surmise, on nothing less fickle than my position relative to the direction of the earths rotation.  In one instant my sinuses feel like cathedrals and my hearing is so acute that I can follow a conversation in the street a block away.  The next instant I am deaf, and The Blob has grown to fill all the cathedral space, and is threatening to invade the town.

I told them not to expect me at work tomorrow.  I can say, like president, Jr.—except I have justification—that this will be a long term proposition.  I may try to return Sunday; that would make for only four missed work-days.  Or I may set my sights on Tuesday (I have Mondays off) and make it an even week.

And allow me to suggest that you visit reX's site.  The webcam is interesting, but he writes with absolute sincerity and brutal honesty.  Much of what I discovered in his archives touches on familiar names, themes and images from the year and a half during which I was obsessed with him daily, even hourly.  But even for the uninitiated, reX tells a story, in days, of joy and tragedy and love and heartbreak and hope.  Above all else reX is delicately sensitive, and exquisitely humanitarian.  I don't know what he gets from putting up on the web his cam images, his voice and his words, but he cannot possibly have any idea how much he gives to us by doing it.  Personally, I am moved to tears, as well as inspired by great gusts of hope, over and over again by his faithful sharing of his life.  I love reX dearly—and we have yet to speak.

I'm tweaking my template (even still), and blogger apparently pings weblogs.com for each tweak even though there is no new post.  Sorry if you have come here seeking newness and been disappointed. 

Excerpt from the Independent News:

Independent News

Been coughing and wheezing for five days.  Deep down in my lungs I can hear the fizzing-gurgling of stuff that shouldn't be there.  It seldom emerges, even after an hour of deliberate effort to tear it loose and spew it out.  Because of the concurrent head cold which I am also enjoying, each rib-cracking cough of my chest cold makes my head feel like the homerun ball at the end of a slugger's bat.  I am up to about 50 grand slams today; there must have been thousands yesterday.  I start the day with a swig of cough syrup and 7 ibuprofen.  Please write and tell me how foolish I am, how I should not even be allowed to have medicine if I am not going to follow the rules and make nice, how I deserve to be sick, to suffer and to die because I do what I feel like doing instead of feeling like I am told to feel, how commie, liberal, terrorist, pinkoe fags like me...  Well, you get the picture.  And really, don't get your panties all in a bunch; I have an appointment with the doctor in an hour.  Maybe he'll give me some psych meds, too.

I thought that I was all better when I got up today.  Tuesday night, my coughing and wheezing woke me from a sound sleep several times. ; Not so last night.  I woke with nary a gurgle.  Considered calling the doc's office and cancelling—too late for that, I decided.  Then I began rehearsing how I would explain my lack of distress during the appointment which I so urgently requested yesterday.  But soon the hack woke up too, and I was barking all over the house, and collapsing into a kind of combat crouch which I have developed for these episodes of sustained, explosive coughing.  So, we're off to see the wizard...

And this (from days ago—I have to stop reading sites in reverse!) is so very sad.  You made me cry.  Again.

There are many trite things available to say; none of them help.  Cry.  Break stuff.  Make the neighbors wonder if you're not unstable.  Then laugh at the neighbors, and go buy better stuff. 

Oh, and get drunk.  (Was that trite?  I'm sorry if it seems so, but I really mean it.).  Margarita's or Martini's, vodka Martini's.  Mmmm, I'd forgotten why I like tragedy so much.

These are the musings of a poetic heart breathing gently like a warm breeze on a balmy sun-filled afternoon.  He makes me sigh; such a sparkling gift, so perfectly bestowed, and brief. 

Ahhh, the lips.  You can keep them, more truly than you can keep any pop lyric which will never be yours alone.  You've kissed others, and so has he.  But those were all different, completely different.  Those others can't, and none in the future ever will, bring two together in one small moment, within one small space, sharing a single halting breath in any way even close to the way that you and he did it.  A kiss is an intersection of emotion and moment and neither will ever be the same again, not for you or for him.  Each kiss is as much yours now as it was in the instant you drew back from it. 

...big strokes, thick scribble, bright colors only.  Warm as your lips are.

Pinochet judge asks to question Kissinger, an article from The Guardian today, says in part, "The former US secretary of state is wanted for questioning by Baltasar Garzon over his alleged involvement in a plot by former South American military dictatorships to persecute and eliminate their opponents in the 1970s and 1980s."

A long life is not always such a good thing.  Too bad we have to wait until men like Kissinger become frail before we dare speak the truth about their crimes in our midst.  The question I am really wanting answered is this: Will American government officials—both former and current—ever subject themselves to the same international criminal code that they seek so broadly to impose on officials of other governments?  I think not; one of the perquisites of power is the ability to imperiously disregard the rantings of those who know the truth.

I know it is unbecoming of me, but I hope Henry lives many years more, the longer for me to relish his decline. 

Finally, not to worship Hitchens too much, but here is an article he wrote nine months ago in which he touches on the arrogant, self-serving attitude that Palestinians can have rights only if they deserve them.  Talk about crime in our midst...

Guardian Unlimited

Ariel Sharon warns troops may storm Yasser Arafat's ruined HQ to capture terrorists wanted by Israel.

I am Shirley-McLain-ian, to a degree.  I believe that I chose this life before I was born, and this spot on the planet to live it, and the people who were my family.  All these things I whine about, ...they've been happening forever, and probably will happen forever, and will happen whether I am here to gasp at the horror or not.

When one experiences an overwhelming trauma, I think a person tends to believe something like, "This horribleness is only happening here—it can't be like this everywhere.".  Of course it is not horrible everywhere, but once a victim focuses solely on their own trauma, it is only a short step to seeing it as the only trauma. 

From the way I have lived my life you'd think that pain and suffering were my invention, that my surveillance of it is novel and unique, and that no one has ever noticed injustice before me.  I have to keep reminding myself: It is not all about me.  It never has been.

So what is the other response?  Tell me please.  Parts of the world containing millions of people are going to hell in a handbasket, and I skip merrily along like a girl in a Spring dress distributing depressing little vignettes as though they were flower petals.  But what's the other response?  ...the one that does not dwell so tenaciously on tragedy?

(Let's see if i can do this without 'dwelling tenaciously on the tragedy.'). 

Focusing away from the point-at, gasping, horror may not be the same thing as denying it is there, but it feels that way to me.  Pretending everything is OK is charged for me, supercharged emotionally.  As you may know, when I was two years old, I experienced a horror that has not yet ended.  But that event in itself is not the point.  The thing that makes it difficult for me not to scream (figuratively), even when screaming has been done to an annoying excess (like I have done in this blog), is that the two year old's screams were deliberately ignored.  The choice was made to ignore what happened, to pretend everything was OK, because in 1961 nobody wanted to put my father's brother in a mental institution, which would have been the course at the time, and nobody knew how to handle the rape of a child; nobody even wanted to admit that it had happened. 

So it didn't.  My screams all drowned in the sea of denial around me.  And my reality rejected my experience.  My going-on-three-year-old life in Northboro, Massachusetts became stunningly and tragically unreal when parents, family, extended family, and even family friends, all rejected my experience as if my story were the problem, instead of the horror it was reporting.

So, the image of skipping merrily along like a girl in a Spring dress distributing depressing little vignettes as though they were flower petals, captures in some way the absurdity of my experiences—perhaps the absurdity of everyone's experiences. 

And screaming, ...well, I don't know when to stop because I have been taught to believe that I make no sound at all. 

I don't know where to start, this article tells of so many crimes and inhumanities.  Like rocketing and bulldozing homes while civilians still occupy them.  Like using prisoners as human shields.  Like extrajudicial executions and disposal of bodies in unmarked mass graves. 

Are the Israeli's allowed to do this because of the Holocaust?  We need to get over our gentile guilt.  I have only skimmed the surface of that genocide's horror, like lightly touching the numbers etched in glass, and even that was overwhelming.  But nothing justifies repeating that behavior.  Nothing.  I acknowledge the base urge of the Israeli people to return horrors and inhumanities for the horrors and inhumanities which have been inflicted on them.  But civilization, by definition, means that such atrocities are stopped, not perpetuated.  Sharon, in everything he has done his whole career, has sought to perpetuate the insanity of hatred.  Israel, stop him.

Where are the tears?  Where have our hearts and souls gone? 

Rendered evil?  Is that like rendered fat?  No, of course not, but it makes about as much sense. 

It has taken me some time to come to terms with my anger and disappointment with Israel, but I am now an unapologetic critic of Israeli actions.  Israel is the one in this conflict that has rockets, jets, helicopters, bulldozers, tanks and an army.  Israel is using her military assests to silence, terrorize and punish the Palestinian people not for suicide bombings but for dissenting—dissent which by any account is overwhelmingly justified.  If anything, the suicide bombers have played into Sharon's bloody hands, and he has encouraged them every step of the way.  I have observed nothing but contempt from the Israeli government toward the Palestinians, whose land they occupy.  No rational assessment can conclude from current Israeli actions that the Palestinian people have any hope for the future beyond complete submission without protest, and increased suffering beneath the heel of a boot—until they are exterminated.  Israel wants ALL the land.

If there is an evil here, it certainly does not spring from the heart of a child who blows herself up in desperation and rage.  Nor does it originate in the heart of a 23 year old boy who has faced the black hole of an Israeli gunbarrel—more often than not pointed by a soldier in a livid rage—every work day for a year.  I submit to you that evil is a quality of behavior, not an entity in itself, and the side whose behavior has had the most evil effect is not the side least powerful and most villified.  Israel must change, or suffer the consequences of harboring evil, which will not come in the form af a crushing military assault like the one being waged against the Palestinians.  The consequences to Israel-the-oppressor will be a godless rot from within its own soul.  I think it has begun.

What the hell is real?  And will it hurt me?  The answers, respectively, are nothing, and yes. 

What does it matter what's real, anyway?  I mean, it's either nothing, or everything.  Or nothing and everything.  It is a superfluous question.  Doesn't matter.  And hurt?—that's a subjective thing.  If I'm addicted to pain killers and suddenly stop taking them, then just being awake hurts.  If I have attained a modest enlightenment around the issue of pain and suffering, then my injuries, though they hurt, serve to expand me rather than diminish me.  In the latter case, hurt is a desirable thing.  In fact, at some point beyond the fear and panic it might otherwise cause, hurt becomes a gratifying gift, the mark of an attenuated sensitivity to conscious life.

These are practical questions for me.  I have not gotten beyond the fear and panic yet to whatever it is that we call 'real'—the true story of me playing itself out in my absence.  I'm missing it.  Though I am in this story, I am not present to it.  I get glimpses of the story of me when people, usually strangers and usually in response to my writing, make observations about me.  This is like catching a distorted reflection of myself in the chrome of a passing car.  To say the least, this is a rather eclectic and remote way of appreciating the art of my own story.  But it proves I have not vanished.  Not yet. 

I am addicted to unconsciousness.  No drugs for me, thank you.  They are not strong enough.  They just leave me groggy, but still connected.  What I want is to completely disconnect; what do the shrinks call it?—dissociate.  That's what does it for me.  In the tacky personal exposes, and in the Readers' Digest versions of life, dissociation is described as being pushed out of your own body and floating ghostlike above it, beside it—somewhere nearby—and watching like a spectator while this horror or that is being perpetrated upon you.  I described it once rather aptly (if I do say so myself) in this snippet:

...and that's just it, disconnecting hurts.  It's the only drawback.  Otherwise I could visit and observe life comfortably, like an oceanographer in a glass sphere, visiting a shipwreck.  Warm, dry, ...breathing.  As a tool for oceanography, this works.  As a tool for living life, it is an unweildy contraption requiring most of my effort just to cart it around.  It obstructs every touch and whisper, and it imposes upon anyone who would communicate with me the need make cryptic gestures in an impromptu sign language.  I am the boy in the bubble.  The only problem is that there is no goddamn reason for the bubble.  It's worthless.  It's useless.  And it is now causing more pain than it ever protected me from, once upon a time.  In panic now I cling to it, remembering how it saved me once.  But the quality of disconnecting, which was salvific decades ago, is rapidly becoming fatal today.

I can't wait to see what happens next.

And this from the book I am reading:

It has been a sad and depressing ...week, ...month, ...season?  Life?  I don't know, but I hope this darkness lifts.  And I am glad this man is in the same world as me, at the same time as me—if for no other reason than to reinforce a feeble hope I have that people are all that really matter; that connections between souls are indeed possible; and that the dirty, cheap, puny things we do to each other both personally and globally have not, yet, submerged us completely.

There may be hope.

I am in the midst of a transition (again).  The muse came briefly today, but blogger was down (again).  I have been teetering on the verge of switching to Greymatter, and (until later today, maybe) I am going that way.  Whether I abandon blogger forever, or come to my senses and return to the fold, I still need to keep them both up for a bit.  Besides, as you can see, the Greymatter version needs a lot of work.

Israel is using one of the finest military machines on earth to exterminate dirt-poor Palestinians who have little more than rocks to throw at the advancing tanks.  Israel would have us think that the only way to stop suicide bombers is to eliminate their enemies—exterminate them. 

I once viewed Israel as a just state, a people with a dignity born of horrors survived, who posessed such enviable strength of resolve and determination of will that I began to expect miracles in whatever they chose to do.  I expected justice from a people who had risen above unspeakable injustice, and I trusted that love and unselfish compassion underpinned their fearsome power.  Maybe it was a misperception, a fantasy—a myth.  But it was a comely myth, and in that land of Israel, which I apparently saw so unclearly from this far, dwelt justice, and around it arose conflict, as it always does wherever justice dwells.  And I trusted the powerful, just state—the state that showed astounding restraint when the scuds flew by not obliterating Baghdad, which it could easily have done—I trusted Israel to use its power, its strength, and its dominance to counter enmity with forgiveness, to nurture goodness and kindness while banishing brutality and hatred from its land.  In a world of competing, petty, self-centered states, I trusted the State of Israel to be not a state, but to be Israel. 

Now Israel has shed its raiments divine, and beneath, is indistinguishable from her enemies, both past and present.  This may be the greatest tragedy I have ever known.

I don't know what we expect the Palestinian people to do.  God help us, but no person can be expected to endure being brutalized for thirty five years without becoming brutal—or dead.  Perhaps Ghandi could do it.  And Mandela actually did it.  But the rarity of such greatness should increase, not decrease, our compassion for those who are driven by overwhelming rage and despair to do monstrous things.  They are not like Ghandi or Mandela, they are just like you or me, and in their place I don't know if I would not do the same.

She was eighteen, an A-student.  Aayat al-Akhras was not a terrorist, but a girl who had lost any remnant of hope when she blew herself up in a supermarket in West Jerusalem on Friday, March 29.  The young security guard who tried to stop her is either dead, or will be maimed for life.  None of these people deserve the death and destruction that has engulfed them, but it does serve the despicable purposes of some old men in suits.  Sharon has no intention of tolerating a Palestinian state, and the more he can provoke them into a hysteria of self-destruction, the better.  And Bush is in league with Mr. Sharon because Bush will be depending heavily on Israeli support when he goes after Saddam Hussein in Iraq.  Besides that, Sharon's brutality with the Palestinian Arabs might just provoke Saddam, giving Bush even more reason to attack him.

But the truth, indeed, is from the mouths of babes, and these killing, dying, hating young people—both Israeli and Palestinian—indict the men in suits irrefutably for failing to lead unselfishly, for failing to put right ahead of hate, and for promoting fear in order to achieve their own ends instead of inspiring courage in order to advance the good of all. 

It is just overwhelmingly depressing.

Happy 24th, Denys!  Three years ago, you were half my age.  Kisses.

Why am I not here? 

The effort is continuing right now. 

Regarding the Six Day War, in June of 1967, Golda Meir remarked, "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our sons.  We can’t forgive them, however, for forcing us to kill their sons.".  In that conflict, the Isrealis were outnumbered three to one, yet they prevailed.  Today the tables have been reversed, and today it is the Palestinians who must forgive the incomprehendable agonies inflicted on them by their Isreali occupiers.  This may be possible, though it may well be more than any of us remote from the killing can rightly expect from any people.  But even beyond this, beyond forgiving the injuries recieved, now each side must additionally forgive the other for forcing it to draw the blood of its enemy's sons. 

If I were there, even in that land of miracles, could I ever in my life forgive you for making me a killer?