Bye and Bye

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

It may not be possible to write about hatred unless one hates. Does hate or has hated. Three boys, teenagers hitchhiking home from school, kidnapped and murdered. How does one understand such angry, vengeful hatred. How does one respond? Either from afar or on the scene, how to react, how does one respond? 

Or, how does one not respond?

What is one’s objective in response? 

Punish?

Deter?

Terrorize?

Teach?
Avenge?

Old Testament style, one gathers forces on the border and begins to move, every living thing in one’s path a target, no living thing moving, breathing, or twitching in one’s wake.  

Has been done:

Occupying powers of the Third Reich responded to the assassination of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich by massacring all men and boys, shipping all women and children to concentration camp, and bulldozing the village. Vengeance works. Power works.

What works depends on who has power. Or on who does not have power but vengefully resolves not to remain cowed and powerless. What worked depends on who writes history. Who reads and reflects on history. Who may learn, or not. What should have been done. What was done.

To salve their consciences and solve their Jewish problem in the wake of the Holocaust, victorious powers displaced millions of Palestinians from their history, heritage, lands and homeland, awarded it as Israel, and created an eternal humanitarian catastrophe of vehement hatred, determination and boundless resolve. Silently, subtly, clothed in nobility but fully as antisemitic as its cause, the solution was the new problem, and is the problem, preventing for all time all hope and intent of peace. 

How to respond? 

Murder each other’s children.

Punish

Teach

Deter

Terrorize
Avenge.

Hate.

Murder each other's children. Hatred. Vengeance. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Hatred is eternalized. Vengeance is the strategy of fools. Only to be envied are those whose work is done. Today is Tuesday, my day for visiting some of them and remembering beloved others.

Bye and Bye.

TW

Murdered: four teenage boys and counting.