It could be instructions for using anti-dandruff shampoo, but in this case, it applies to vengeance. The news pundits and their authorities have been saying today that failure to speak out against Hamas’ odious acts in Israel is akin to tacit endorsement of those acts. Until now, I have posted nothing about the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians nor about the antecedent Israeli-Arab conflicts nor about the Israeli response to the current attacks.
While I have neither family nor personal friends in the conflict zone, I do have close friends who do. I worry for them and those they love. I have mentioned in the past that part of my genetic heritage is Sephardic Judaism. So, I guess that I am loosely related to the people on both sides of the conflict. Sigh.
I am not going to choose sides. I simply do not know enough about the specifics. I will only say that the slaughter of civilians is a monstrous crime whether it occurs in an American grade school or in an Israeli Kibbutz. That it is committed for political reasons makes it only the more odious. That children are its victims makes it nothing less than a crime against humanity.
Yet here we are. Every war, including our own engagements in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a terrible toll of innocents as collateral damage – non-combatant women and children among them. That women and children should be targeted simply for the terror and drama value makes those deaths only more offensive to humanity.
I’m not sure why we continue to do this to one another. For many years, I thought that it was about shit. “That shit was mine until you took it, and I’m going to take that shit back.” This many decades later, I am not so sure. Maybe it is that injustice leads to anger which then leads to vengeance, and that to hate. And the cycle repeats. Vengeance leaves many casualties in its wake – truth and justice among them.
We apply injustice, lather anger against it into vengeance, and then let it become hate so that the senseless cycle can be repeated yet again. As a species, we seem incapable of learning the lessons of our own history.