Thursday morning star

This is highly personal, a memory that, because a human mind can be impossible to understand or explain, to me distantly relates to what is happening in Gaza. 

Over a period of seven years, some forty-five and more years ago, I was being flown down from WashingtonDC and Pennsylvania six Times a year to teach graduate courses in major defense acquisition management as an adjunct professor at the University of West Florida. 

Actually, someTimes I flew and someTimes I drove. A couple of Times I stopped in Pensacola on my way home from business trips to Australia or the West Coast. Three Times, twice driving and once flying, when coming down from our home in Pennsylvania, I brought daughter Tass along with me because I usually stayed at my parents' home, the Old Place, and it was an opportunity for me to be with Tass, and for her to visit her grandparents while I was away teaching at UWF during the day.

On one occasion, we arrived to hear that my father was planning to trap a vicious and rapidly expanding family of feral cats the next day, mother cat and a litter of kittens, and destroy them. I would be out of town for class and Tass would be there at the house with my parents for the day. 

Horrified at the thought of this happening while Tass was there, before I left predawn to drive to campus the next morning, I left my father a note asking him not to do anything to the cats while we were visiting. He complied, although later he expressed something between annoyance and anger with me that doing as I'd asked had caused him to miss the chance and he never got another.

My mind runs a relationship about life itself, intentionally destroying animals, people. I know it's tied to my shame at myself when I shot a baby blue jay in a tree in our backyard, with my BB gun when I was about twelve years old. The little bird fell to the ground, I ran and picked it up and it died as I held it in my hand. 

Israel's strategy in Gaza, of defeating Palestinians by making it impossible for the population to get food, water, and medical care, and concocting reasons to shoot people who gather panicked around food trucks, is inhuman, cruel and degrading, if understandable considering the delight Gazan people showed in the atrocities committed on 7 October. Hamas is unspeakable evil spreading through generations.  

Well do I remember how we felt about our fire-bombings of German and Japanese cities, and the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which helped bring WW2 to an end and saved countless American lives: we felt no pity, no compassion, only determination that our enemies be crushed into unconditional surrender.

And yet the conscience of every decent human being cries out for suffering and dying Gazan children who are still innocent, not yet grown up into Israel-hating supporters of Hamas: the Israeli conviction, in fury after 7 October, that there is no innocence in Gaza, is understandable if arguable. Children have to be taught to hate, and murderous hatred of Israel, Israelis, and Jews has been inculcated in every generation of Palestinian children since at least 1948. Every baby born is a candidate terrorist. 

But children. The children. God's children. 

There was a story that came out of the Gulf War, our short war in early 1991 to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. An American reconnaissance team was hunkered down in a hiding place near an Iraqi village, with orders that under no circumstances were they to let their presence be discovered. But a group of children from the village discovered them. The team's dilemma: flee and let the children report them, or kill the children and escape undetected. 

This was not My Lai, the lowest point in American history. In the Gulf War case, the American soldiers fled immediately as the Iraqi children watched them, letting the children be.

For most of us there is a moral conscience. No one's life is worth more than the life of a child. But moral judgment can be corrupted by the fury of unrelenting rage. It happened after Pearl Harbor, after 9/11. It's happening now after 7 October. Lord, have mercy.

Christ, have mercy.

Lord, have mercy.

T89&c 

bad pic: looking east from 7H front walkway, early, I'd gone out to see where the lightning was coming from