Kabul
Memorial
“The
stark and inescapable fact is that today we cannot defend our society by war
since total war is total destruction, and if war is used as an instrument of
policy, eventually, we will have total war.”
Lester
B. Pearson (Former Prime Minister of Canada)
The
devastating suicide bombs in Kabul yesterday, like the bombing of Pearl Harbor,
will be forever etched in our collective memory as the ghastly horrors that they
were. I will spare you my lecture on the futility of war—the fact that no one
wins, no one comes back the same. Everyone who goes to war loses a part of
themselves, and knows that for every life taken, every life lost, hundreds of
people suffer. We stand, once again with broken hearts.
I was talking with a man
from that part of the world last night at his niece’s violin recital. He said
we are naturally aggressive animals whose nature it is to defend ourselves and
our families, and war is an offshoot of that. He’s right of course. You can see
that in action by watching your pets establish hierarchy within the pack—there can
be only one alpha. My hope is that humanity will somehow grow a little more
cerebral cortex that enables us to rise above our lizard brains and find less
murderous means of solving our differences.
It is
true that America has enemies like ISIS who are ruthless, and murderous, and delight
in killing anyone who thinks a thought outside their prescribed dogma. Perhaps
there will always be the primitive belief that problems are solved by power,
and that whoever has the most guns wins—even though we know from experience that this is not true.
God knows, there are more guns in the US than there are people. One wonders
when this reverence for the power of bullets will end.
My
heart goes out to the mothers and fathers, the sisters, and brothers, of all
the people who were killed in Kabul yesterday—regardless of their nationality,
religion, or race. It is yet another senseless blight on the soul of the human
species. I wish we were better than this—for the sake of our children and
theirs.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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