The Art of Grieving

There are three young men dead today.  No, let me correct that, they have been dead for weeks but we only discovered this today.  We grieve.  We grieve because this epitomizes the senseless atrocities that exist in the Middle East.  Regardless of the fact that there are over 160,000 dead in Syria.  Regardless of all the death and destruction in Iraq.  The ongoing death in Egypt.  The entire Arab world it seems in fact is imploding.  Destroying itself in order to attempt to reinvent itself.  But we grieve for three young men not because their number is so significant, but because we came to know them, to understand the love that others had for them, and the depth of the void their death has now achieved. 

I know many will blame Israel for the death of these three young men.  They will swear that if we did not occupy the West Bank that this would not have happened.  But they are wrong.

Something has happened to our humanity.  We have lost our focus, lost our direction, lost our essentials.  We all hate each other. 

They pass out candy when others die.   We smile with satisfaction when our retribution is complete.When our air force strikes surgically.   

We hate each other from morning to night.

We hate each other during each and every season.

We want peace.

We want war.

We want what we are told we should want, and we want what we should not want though we keep these thoughts more quiet.  

 I grieve for these young boys.  I grieve for they represent the depth of our sadness, the essence of our humanity, the loss of innocence for so many, and a recapitulation of a narrative fixed in stone and fixed deeply in those parts of our brain that won't and can't change.

We hate each other deeply and will take turns killing and justifying our actions while they pass out candy in Gaza,  and we sing songs in Rabin Square.  They will carry their dead through the streets waving Kalaznicovs and we will gather by the thousands in graveyards putting small stones on the graves of those we have lost.

I feel dizzy thinking about what will happen next.  What always happens next.  And how we never seem to define what the real problem is nor establish a true "road map."  Yet I also realize that we are no different from so many others in this world where conflict is a way of life, a way of uniting the masses, a language all its own.