From Israel With Love...

Every year brings with it a layer of cynicism that coats my soul and heart. Images that leave their cold impressions in my mind. Every year I guess I grow a little wiser? In todays’ world perhaps wiser equates to being emotionless and skeptical.

I find myself thinking of the people I saw on television selling parts of the World Trade Centre buildings after they fell and turned into the collective graves of so many – pieces of gravestones for a price. People filling their pockets with money from the dead and the dying when the earth shook and homes were destroyed in the Himalayas. People I suppose- surviving…

It isn’t that I’m unaware of the economic Hydra that we have fed in the modern world – a far more real creature than its imaginary Greek ancestor. It’s just that I somehow always think that the beasts’ tentacles are far fewer in number – and then another image stares at me from the newspaper pages or the television screen. I find that the tentacles proliferate at an unimaginable rate – that there are hardly any hearts not touched by them.

Yesterday brought with it a new image. One I would rather not have known.

Pretty children painting words on shiny, metallic, army-green missiles. Sarcastic words of love – I wondered if they really knew what it was that they wrote!? Could they have any idea of the destruction that these painted ‘presents’ would wreak? Are children even capable of sarcasm?

I choose to believe that the grown ups put them up to it – that they planted such sick thoughts in innocent minds.

A little girl with curly brown hair – a laughing smile and a little bronze hand clutching the markers that have written: “From Israel and Daniele”. The letters are ill formed and reflect the inner world of the child who wrote them.

Another photograph showing two little girls painting the stack of missiles – and in the background a military tank and a soldier.

And then the last image – one that stays in my mind. A little child lying on its tummy – clothes torn and limbs lifeless. Those gifts certainly found their intended targets – people of flesh and blood who now lie silent.

Surely the children who painted those missiles could not have known what they were doing – surely, if they were taught to empathize they would regret the words?

We may talk of our wonderful civilization – of the Human Rights Charters that we have written again and again over the years. I wonder though how civilized it is to teach beautiful young hearts that it is well and good to still tiny hands and to extinguish the light in laughing eyes.

The more I see of our world the more I am convinced that children should be taught empathy – the power to put themselves in others shoes.

Without these skills – without compassion we can be sure our children will learn only to paint bombs.

Those people who have lived before us – our ancestors – were more civilized than us. We have no right to call ourselves enlightened or progressive. This is not progression – it is a fall into the abyss.