long-time listener, first-time caller
been looking at blogs for a while, ever since my brother put his up about 18 months ago. at first i thought it was a little like compulsive self-talk, but it's grown on me . . .
anyway, been thinking today about lebanon, as so many other bloggers etc have been. i feel so helpless, and so torn, having good friends whose children have been injured by hizbollah bombs in israel, knowing people who have lived and worked in beirut, with my stepmother who worked in aid in gaza in the 1980s. so difficult to know who is right and who is wrong, and i reach the inenviable conclusion that what i think matters nada. it is times like this that one's own agnst about such horrible and seemingly unstoppable events can feel selfindulgent . . . like we in the safe west like to take sides and decide who has suffered more, who deserves more sympathy, who is forgivable, and who is not. and i realise it is our human tendancy to play God, to need to know for certain who's in and who's out, that comes into play here.
it's not a scale of suffering: we don't get to say 'well, the israelis have spent the sympathy they got for 6 million dead, and the weight is tipped in Hizbollah's favour.' we don't get to make the choice - dead babies are dead babies - and we must rage against the death of innocents, on both sides. i think it was sinead o'connor, speaking of the troubles in ireland of course, who stated (much more melodiously) 'your cause is not worth one dead baby'.
the book i think of at the moment, the one i am going to have to re-read as i wait for some unknown group to release Olaf - who used to drive us around wellington in his beautiful citroen that we weren't allowed to eat in in case we made crumbs - and who i think of every time i clean the mountains of child-related crumbs out of my car - back to the book, kate! - the book is 'The Last of the Just' by Andre Schwarz-Bart.
"And so it was for millions, who turned from Luftmenschen into Luft. I shall not translate. So this story will not finish with some tomb to be visited in memmoriam. For the smoke that rises from the crematoriums obeys physical laws like any other: the aprticles come together and disperse according to the wind that propels them. The only pilgrimage, estimable reader, would be to look with sadness at a stormy sky now and then."
i'm also reading some more C.S. Lewis, alongside Isaiah Berlin's collected essays. trying to continue to feel hopeful at a time when hope seems a guttering candle.
anyway, been thinking today about lebanon, as so many other bloggers etc have been. i feel so helpless, and so torn, having good friends whose children have been injured by hizbollah bombs in israel, knowing people who have lived and worked in beirut, with my stepmother who worked in aid in gaza in the 1980s. so difficult to know who is right and who is wrong, and i reach the inenviable conclusion that what i think matters nada. it is times like this that one's own agnst about such horrible and seemingly unstoppable events can feel selfindulgent . . . like we in the safe west like to take sides and decide who has suffered more, who deserves more sympathy, who is forgivable, and who is not. and i realise it is our human tendancy to play God, to need to know for certain who's in and who's out, that comes into play here.
it's not a scale of suffering: we don't get to say 'well, the israelis have spent the sympathy they got for 6 million dead, and the weight is tipped in Hizbollah's favour.' we don't get to make the choice - dead babies are dead babies - and we must rage against the death of innocents, on both sides. i think it was sinead o'connor, speaking of the troubles in ireland of course, who stated (much more melodiously) 'your cause is not worth one dead baby'.
the book i think of at the moment, the one i am going to have to re-read as i wait for some unknown group to release Olaf - who used to drive us around wellington in his beautiful citroen that we weren't allowed to eat in in case we made crumbs - and who i think of every time i clean the mountains of child-related crumbs out of my car - back to the book, kate! - the book is 'The Last of the Just' by Andre Schwarz-Bart.
"And so it was for millions, who turned from Luftmenschen into Luft. I shall not translate. So this story will not finish with some tomb to be visited in memmoriam. For the smoke that rises from the crematoriums obeys physical laws like any other: the aprticles come together and disperse according to the wind that propels them. The only pilgrimage, estimable reader, would be to look with sadness at a stormy sky now and then."
i'm also reading some more C.S. Lewis, alongside Isaiah Berlin's collected essays. trying to continue to feel hopeful at a time when hope seems a guttering candle.
posted by kate at 6:40 PM
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