Can We Survive the Sadness?

Thinking peace through endless wars

My father and his brothers — themselves children of America’s bloody civil war — fought the “war to save democracy,” sometimes termed the “war to end wars.” Two uncles survived that one only to die in the flu pandemic of the early 20th century.

As a child, I gathered scrap to advance the cause of eventual peace in the “Great War,” more prosaically just World War II.

Those were just openers.

With only a brief breather — during which we may or may not have learned anything from the tragedies of McCarthyism — there have been almost perpetual wars: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa and today’s unimaginable horrors in Ukraine and now Gaza.

There seems just too much sadness.

I think it comes from the immediacy of tragedy today. With the bright lights of San Francisco outside my window, the TV inside shows Gaza in near-total darkness. Fleeing families, broken bodies, crying children are on front pages in real time.

Can anyone erase the images of Mariupol?

Unlike earlier wartimes, today’s sufferings are viscerally omnipresent to people thousands of miles distant. If you don’t feel that sadness you may be short a humanity gene or two.

Still, hope persists.

Political strategist Dahlia Scheindlin, who speaks of “Palestinian and Israeli friends and colleagues (who) comfort one another in times of escalation” published an op ed in the October 14 New York Times that looks unblinkingly at the darkness of the Hamas/Israeli war and the reality that days ahead will be worse.

Still, Scheindlin says work toward a “partnership-based peace” will continue, and she still sees “sparks of optimism.”

Organizations like Ploughshares Fund and Peace Action have not slowed down. Doctors Without Borders is on the scene. Individuals and faith communities around the globe are sending help — and prayers.

The only antidote to the sadness I can think of is to work with all of the above. And join with Scheindlin in clinging, for now, to “solidarity, morality, equality and justice.” And the tiny hope that all of the above will some day deliver us to that most elusive element of these centuries —

Peace.