Violence, Tears, and a Returning

I’ve thought about blogging on the violence in the Middle East… my great sense of sorrow… I just can’t seem to get past this overwhelming sense of futility…. of the cycle continuing… of the endless suffering… endless hate… I just don’t see it being resolved until the conversation moves away from the past… the “who did what to whom.” There can never be satisfaction in those terms.

So I haven’t felt like I have anything useful to add to the discussion. I just watch the coverage with tears running down my cheeks. With a strange sense of personal connection… not that I can remember, but I was born in Ankara, Turkey (to American parents) at the time the 6-day war broke out in the Middle East. My father had to leave my mother and I there and (to organize the next locations of a U.S. government program that brought education on peaceful uses of nuclear energy to other countries) had to go to Tehran and then Baghdad where he ended up part of a convoy trying to escape the war.

That story is part of my identity… watching the coverage of the current war feels like a hopeless returning to the past… to frightened people again caught up in violence… again and again.