How to help?

"...Israel will fight until the battle is won for our sake and for the sake of the peace and security of the entire world."

When you hear this, after these 366 days, you know words have lost their meaning. 

When you see people applaud this statement, you know that people have lost their way.

How to help? This is the question that burns in my heart. We are bound to each other. We can't win by forcing others to lose. We win together or we lose together. We live short enough for this to have eluded many of us. But it's like a bomb waiting to explode. I feel our generation will either disarm this bomb or have it explode in our face.

How to help?

The road less traveled

"…At Hand in Hand schools, where every class has two teachers — a Hebrew speaker and an Arabic speaker — the conversation about the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war unfolding in Gaza sounds markedly different than in other schools. “We might have different languages, religions and cultures, but we choose to be here together,” Haya Saleh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and the third graders’ Arabic-speaking teacher, said to her students…“It’s possible to be together, it’s preferable to be together, and it’s also the right thing to do,” said Gezeel Jarroush Absawy, the principal of the Hand in Hand elementary school in Haifa. To that end, the schools emphasize processing individual and generational trauma. They present history through the lenses of both Israelis and Palestinians, and foster relationships between Arabs and Jews in childhood in the hope that they can extend into adulthood…"

Source : www.nytimes.com/2023/12/31/world/middleeast/israel-schools-jews-arabs.html

For the coming year to be better, we need to do better. We need to venture down the roads least traveled.

Day 72 or climbing the wrong ladder

You set a goal. You go after it. No matter what.

No matter what?

What if what it takes defeats your purpose.

Worse: what if what it takes corrodes you.

When I was in high school, one of our teachers told us something that has stuck with me: if you want to go straight, a sure way to get lost is to set one foot after the other. It creates the illusion of you walking on a straight line but walking like that will lead you astray. She said: the only way to go straight is to look where you want to go, your steps will follow.

If it is not you leading the way but you do care about where you are going, always ask: are we setting one foot after the other or are we indeed headed towards where we want to go? Also ask: do we have the same destination in mind?

And here is a tip about choosing destinations: factor in the consequences of you getting there on Others. It is not about morality. It is about rationality. You are not an island.

Day 29

I understand it is complicated. I understand there is pain and deep trauma all around.

What I don't understand is how come this is the best that can be done.

How can this look to anyone like a solution, to anything.

We lack the leaders and decision makers we need.

Foremost, we need decisions to be made by people who care for what the majority of people cares for. I am convinced that the majority of people desires peace and prosperity and wouldn't mind extending these privileges to everyone on Earth. When it's not the case, there is trauma that needs to be healed, not deepened; there is knowledge and information that needs to be shared, not withheld and distorted.

We need leaders who know how to collaborate and share. We don't need superpowers. We need all hands on deck, everyone sharing what they are good at and learning from others.

We need decisions to be made by people who understand the concept of "different perspectives". It's understanding that what you are convinced is the truth and nothing but the truth is just your truth.

Today's leaders have emerged from a system that is failing. You can trust the best of a thriving system. Can you trust the chosen of a failing one?

I believe we have collectively the means to untangle all mess, however complex. We need to consciously decide we care to do so and each one of us should take it upon ourselves to do our part. Many are already doing so. We need everyone.

Getting started

The value of an individual life a credo they taught us

to instill fear, and inaction, ‘you only live once’

a fog in our eyes, we are

endless as the sea, not separate, we die

a million times a day, we are born

a million times, each breath life and death:

get up, put on your shoes, get

started, someone will finish

//

Tribe

an organism, one flesh, breathing joy as the stars

breathe destiny down on us, get

going, join hands, see to business, thousands of sons

will see to it when you fall, you will grow

a thousand times in the bellies of your sisters

Revolutionary Letter #2, by Diane Di Prima