This just breaks my heart. After all the time homo sapiens have been in existence, I really hate that we have not yet found a better way to solve differences, and that those differences still matter.
When I was in my early twenties, I seriously considered murdering someone. He had given my best friend genital herpes, which many health practitioners then believed was the agent responsible for causing cervical cancer in
tomdispatch.com
“How repetitive history sometimes seems when it comes to slaughter! The response to having
1,200 people in your country,
including at least 29 children, brutally killed is to
slaughter 5,000 or more children in the land where your enemy is hiding. Does that make any sense at all? And keep in mind that, when it comes to the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza, that 5,000 is no more than a holding figure for what could, in the weeks to come, prove to be thousands more kids dead (and who knows how many more wounded ones), some slaughtered by bombs, missiles, and bullets, some undoubtedly succumbing to starvation and disease. We’re already talking about significantly
more dead children than the total number of those killed in conflicts globally in 2022. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has all too accurately
labeled Gaza “a graveyard for children.” (But given what’s happening, it will undoubtedly be a “graveyard” without tombstones or monuments.)
Tell me if that makes sense. What did any children ever do to deserve such a fate? Could this truly be, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
claims, evidence of “the battle of civilization against barbarism”? Does such ongoing slaughter — including staggering numbers of air strikes against Gaza, the destruction of much of its housing and its hospitals, the displacement of
nearly 1.7 million of its 2.3 million people, and the
denial of the most basic human needs (food, fuel, and water) — add up to a reasonable response to the nightmare of Hamas’s October 7th attack? And honestly, has “the essential nation” on this planet, as President Biden likes to
call the United States, done faintly what’s necessary to bring things under control (rather than rushing
yet more weapons to Israel and two
aircraft carrier task forces,
troops, and
planes to the region, creating the possibility of an
even wider war of some sort to come)?
Given such a nightmare, doesn’t it make sense to think about other ways to face the violence that seems such an essential part of the human condition? In that context, let
TomDispatchregular Rebecca Gordon explore the idea of a nonviolent response to our violent world”.
Tom