Black America: Damned if We Do, Damned if We Don’t

 

Nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee loved basketball.  He took that ball with him everywhere he went.  He took it into that Chicago alley on Monday, November 2, 2015 when Chicago police say gang members lured him there in order to murder him.

Nine years old.

Tyshawn’s “crime?”  He had the bad sense to choose as his father a man who police say is probably involved with a lethal gang called the Gangster Disciples.  Apparently, Pierre Stokes, Tyshawn’s “chosen” father, has done something so terrible to this rival gang, they felt it only appropriate to execute his child.  Take THAT, Pierre!

http://abcnews.go.com/US/murder-year-chicago-boy-killed-alleged-gang-related/story?id=35020452

As I have come to expect, and so should you, the gentle people of America who despise the Black Lives Matter movement have crawled out of their self-righteous hidey-holes to decry the black community’s failure to curb this insane slaughter that holds hostage Chicagoans and Baltimoreans and Fergusonians and the people of every other urban city where poverty has been studiously concentrated, by design.  The people who are first in line to scream “black on black” crime as a reason to NOT support efforts to stop police departments to prey upon unarmed black people are the same people who fled their once lily-white, lower-middle-class neighborhoods as soon as one dark-skinned family moved in. 

Let me be perfectly clear.  There is no reason whatsoever for a grown-ass man or woman to plan the execution of a 9-year-old.  I hope the assholes who planned this murder will be snuffed out as quickly and as easily as little Tyshawn was.  I don’t even care who does it.  The police would be preferable, because that would be somewhat more lawful.  However, in all likelihood, it will be the result of Gangster Disciple retaliation, because that’s what criminals do. Besides, the police don’t seem to be able to do much of anything in the ‘hood about real crime.

Yes, I said criminals.  People who belong to gangs are willful breakers of the law. They are outlaws who don’t even believe in laws unless they are the laws of the streets, which they determine.  But just like in the communities of other skin colors, these criminals do not represent the black community.  They are the scourge of the black community.

So why don’t we put a stop to it?

We tried.  We’ve been trying.  In fact, we tried so hard in the late 1960s we actually precipitated the draconian drug laws that now have a large percentage of our black men and women sitting in penal institutions for terms far longer than those for some far more heinous crimes. 

When the concentrated poverty of inner cities across the nation began to cause serious social problems, especially the introduction of drugs as both a profession and a palliative to the grinding poverty, law-abiding residents in those locations started screaming to high heaven for protection.  They went to the place where we have always thought protection was supposed to be provided – the police and the government.  Black leaders pushed hard to bring “law and order” back to their communities.  And the conservatives in power at the time took that political football and ran with it.  They pulled an end-zone-to-end-zone touchdown. 

And thus began the new Jim Crow. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/28/opinion/the-real-roots-of-70s-drug-laws.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region&_r=1

Have you ever wondered why we hear hardly more than crickets from today’s  black leadership about this terrifying coup d'état taking place in Chicago? For your answer, look no further than the All Lives Matter contingent.  As soon as the black community publicly denounces what The Others like to call black-on-black crime in any meaningful way, the heat is immediately lifted from the excessive force and brutality that is plaguing our people.  In fact, the knee-jerk government reaction to any hue and cry from law-abiding black people could easily result in another fully-sanctioned open season on blacks.

The black community, most of which is concentrated in overcrowded, underfunded and crumbling environments, is between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

White people are truly sick of hearing about how slavery started all this.  That’s really unfortunate, because until such time as the majority of white people accept that as truth, these manifestations of oppression will only get worse.  It took hundreds of years to get there, but once the creation of sprawling black ghettos was completed, the rest was absolutely predictable.  But Americans don’t have time to think ahead.  We don’t know how to analyze a problem to include the consequences of the chosen solution.  We are so busy placing blame, quieting consciences and running for lucrative government offices, we don’t seem to care much about consequences.  Everything is about right now.  And this is the now we have created.

When I began to write this piece, I was really angry with a woman named Karla Lee. She was the one who made the ill-advised choice to allow a gangster to father her child.  She should have been smarter than that.  She should have seen the danger her son was in and protected him.  She is just as worthless…

And then I came to my senses.  She is as much a product of this social malfunction as Pierre Stokes and his fellow Gangster Disciples are. The rules of conduct those of us who are so quick to pass judgment live by have little or nothing to do with the social order in Islands of Poor Black Concentration.  Our rules don’t and never have worked for those residents.  They can’t even escape their hell on Earth through education, as we once believed.  Their schools are nothing more than holding tanks for mass incarceration.  Their secondary education is not college, it is the penitentiary.  If and when they ever leave, they graduate as fully-socialized predators and survivors. 

It is going to take more minds than black minds to stop the civil wars in our cities.  It is going to take more than the prayers black churches send up every Sunday.  It is going to take an awakening of the magnitude we only read about in stories of miracles. 

Do I believe in miracles?  Do you?

Papa Francisco and Me

 

“Go, the Mass has ended.”

The last time I heard those words from the altar of a Catholic Church was at a funeral in the late 1990s.  Although I can almost recite an entire Catholic Mass in Latin, I really thought I had lost whatever it was I had in the way of warm-fuzzies about Catholicism.

I didn’t even know the Pope was coming to the United States until he actually got here. After he arrived in Washington, it occurred to me that I actually had heard rumblings as I did my usual multi-tasking with the news broadcasting mutedly in the background.

My status of “recovering Catholic” began in college, when I started learning about life outside the Thou-Shalt-Nots of my parochial schooling,.  One definite no-no was attending non-Catholic church services, so it never occurred to me to learn about other religions. I thought that was probably a sin, too.

The media’s real or feigned excitement about the comings and goings of the popular (even to me) Pope Francis must have been contagious because I found myself glued to the television as if we were back during the time when President Kennedy was taken from us so suddenly. I found myself responding positively to the man who is Pope. I couldn’t take my eyes off him or take my attention away from his words.  His quiet, leisurely speech delivery, instead of being boring, was soothing, almost relaxing.  His pure joy when interacting with the people in the streets, far more so than the dignitaries he was forced to greet and indulge, was transfixing.  This man embodied everything I had imagined as a small child sitting in a hard, highly-polished pew listening to the Pope’s message at Sunday Mass. 

As I sat and whiled the day away on Friday, the second day of Pope Francis’s visit to the United States, I did what the nuns always demanded when any of their pupils misbehaved: I examined my conscience.  What was going on with me, the self-described atheist who believes organized religion to be a sinister influencer of world conflict?  Me, the person who spent three weeks in Europe exploring dozens of grandiose cathedrals that dripped with gold, silver, rubies, emeralds and pearls.  All this excess seemed so far removed from the teachings of Jesus Christ, from the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience taken by the Dominican nuns who shaped my understanding of Catholicism. I kept thinking, while being mesmerized by stained glass windows of overwhelming detail and beauty, how the lives of many suffering people of the world could have been made comfortable if this wealth had been distributed among them.

Popes were individuals of unmatched status to the child I was in the 1950s, when I attended St. James Catholic School in my home town of Maywood, Illinois.  They ruled over more people than the President of the United States.  Their word, according to church doctrine, was infallible, and at the time I thought that meant on all subjects.  My attention may have wandered to the Stations of the Cross which encircled the sacristy during the Homily and the Sunday Sermon, but I never dreamed through a reading of a papal encyclical. My young mind believed my attention to his words was imperative to my salvation.

As I grew older, however, I read of Popes who were nothing like what I expected them to be.  Pope Alexander VI – Rodrigo Borgia of Spain – was elected Pope in 1492, a significant year in American history.  His conduct during his reign that ended with his death in 1503 was about as far removed from my expectations as one could get and still bear the title.  He observed the rules against papal marriages, but that didn’t stop him from siring several children among a number of mistresses, the most famous of whom may be his daughter Lucrezia Borgia.  Talk about a rude awakening!  My imagery of papal deportment was shattered into shards of broken vows and self-centered humanity.  Thus began my journey toward atheism.  It took decades to evolve to its current level of certainty, but those early exposures to real history, and not the highly romanticized history I learned in parochial school, put me on the path.

When the Papal Mass at Madison Square Garden neared the point at which the Pope would utter the words that opened this essay, I found myself saddened a little that it was over.  I realized at that point that my psyche associated the sights and sounds of Catholic ritual with the profound sense of peace I felt whenever I attended such a ceremony.  Even the scent of incense, which actually nauseated me when I was a smaller child, would have been an olfactory trigger of the feeling of being centered and safe, had I been there in person.

My faith, such as it was, hasn’t been reawakened by this string of papal events.  I am firm in my belief that heaven and hell are achieved in life, not in death.  I continue to abhor the pain and suffering religious zealotry has caused humanity since the beginning of time.  What I do have is a new understanding of the role religions can and do play for individuals trying to find their ways through a chaotic and unpredictable life.  When one believes there is a power that overrides one’s own, there can be comfort in throwing the fear of the unknown into the hands of the superior being. 

I often tell people that I was never really given the gift of faith.  I seem to have been in line when the other two virtues, hope and charity, were bestowed, but I obviously missed the day faith was offered.  Sometimes I feel regretful about that because I must rely solely upon myself to make it through this crazy life.  But I haven’t lost the ability to feel the wonderment, the temporary peace and the serenity offered by Catholic ritual.  I was surprised by this, although I probably shouldn’t have been.  The teachings of Catholicism shaped my way of being in this life.  When I hear a siren out in the distance, to this day, I have the urge to make the sign of the cross, which was something we were taught to do in school.  I still care about that person who is being whisked to the hospital or who is a victim of crime.  I even care about the person who might be in trouble with the police. 

And, when I pay attention to the ear worms that invade my distracted thoughts, I find myself humming and, often, singing liturgical hymns, most of which are associated with happiness and joy. 

I guess the old saw applies here, too.  You can take the woman out of Catholicism but you can’t take Catholicism completely out of the woman.

A Stimulating Thanksgiving for L

 

“It’s cool being a black man, ‘cuz everybody’s afraid of you.”

My family’s Thanksgiving was destroyed by the greed of AT&T and the Kohl’s Department Stores.  We had to postpone it until tonight, so that my sister, her son and her grandson could toil in the plantations of Big Business, making sure no coin was left un-snatched from America’s silly consumers.

So, I did what any proud, self-respecting senior citizen would do.  I invited myself to dinner at my long-time neighbors’ who have been trying to get me to their Thanksgiving table for nearly 20 years.  For the purpose of this post I will refer to them as the Guxtables, for this is a family right out of the mold of the famed, but fictitious, TV family.

My friends, B and C Guxtable, have a total of seven children, but only one of them is from their biological union.  Three of them are B’s nieces and nephews who, for one reason or another, were not able to be raised by their birth parents.  Two of them came to the Guxtables via private adoptions when they were infants.  One of them is Mr. Guxtable’s daughter who lives in another state with her mother.

They bought the antique Victorian across the street from my old house in 1995.  It was a shambles, with a crumbling foundation, jungle-like overgrowth in the huge yards and looking as if the only remedy for what ailed it was a bulldozer.  This is what it looks like today.  It is a Bed and Breakfast Inn and the home for the Guxtable clan.

Mama Guxtable is an IT executive who travels the world on business, while Papa G., recently retired from General Motors, helps run the B&B and makes sure the children and two dogs are accounted for, driven to lessons/practices/games, and the grounds stay as pristine as they can possibly be.  Happiness just pours out of those windows – along with the usual angst and drama that comes with teenagers and an 8-year-old who was born an adult. 

B and C are black Southerners, both born in North Carolina.  Two of their “daughters” (nieces, but they claim them as daughters) have a white mother and their father is B’s brother.  They look like me.  One of the adopted sons has skin the color of ebony piano keys and the chiseled facial features of movie star Lupita N’Yongo.  And their oldest “son” (nephew claimed as son), the product of another of B’s brothers and a Mexican woman, represents the most visually attractive aspects of each ethnicity.

B’s favorite sport is teasing me about my “pasty pallor,” once referring to me as White Chocolate.  I feign being insulted, after which we both dissolve in giggles.

I tutored their now 21-year-old daughter and their now 16-year-old son for several years.  I baby sat for all of them at one time or another, if only for a few hours.  They are like family to me.  That’s why it was not as bodacious as it may sound for me to simply crash their feast.

Ferguson, MO came up during the table talk, somewhere between the second-helpings of cornbread stuffing and candied yams.  Despite our pretty visible diversity of DNA, we were all on the same page when it came to our sense of hopelessness for ever seeing the end to America’s Dirtiest Not-So-Little secret.

There were a couple of non-family diners at the table.  One was another mixed-race young man who is the boyfriend of one of the older daughters.  The other was the young man who lives just down the street --I’ll call him John -- whose family was scheduled to eat at 4 p.m., but he was hungry at 1 p.m., so he decided to get an early start at the Guxtables’ table.  That’s the kind of family they are.  All are welcome all the time. 

John is a handsome, mocha-hued young man with the shoulders of a linebacker and the smile of a movie star.  His personality could light up the entire Christmas tree without having to plug it in.  After participating in the discussion about Mike Brown and the recent failure of Brown’s killer to be held accountable, John blurted out the sentence opening this post.

“It’s cool being a black man,’cuz everybody’s afraid of you.”  The laughter that followed was a combination of true appreciation of his humor and the nervous twitter of those of us who weren’t quite feeling the “coolness” of that statement.

John went on the describe the day he and his girlfriend were jogging on the hugely popular new Atlanta Beltline.  Apparently, his girlfriend is either white or a fair-skinned woman of one color or another.  A white man jogged past John and slowed down next to the girlfriend long enough to whisper “Be careful.  There’s a suspicious-looking man following you.”  John was wearing a hooded sweatshirt.

We all agreed we were most thankful, this brilliant and cold Thanksgiving Day, that none of our sons or brothers have had the misfortune of being gunned down while looking suspicious, scary, menacing, thuggish, threatening, or just plain guilty…of something.

I NEED YOU TO UNDERSTAND…

Coming as a surprise to absolutely no one I know, the grand jury in Ferguson, MO, in their infinite wisdom, decided there was not probable cause to charge the police officer who shot an killed and unarmed teenager, firing ten rounds of ammunition in the process.

Coming as a surprise to absolutely no one, the Ferguson District Attorney, in his conniving plotting, delayed the announcement of what was a foregone conclusion until 9 p.m. Monday, virtually guaranteeing the outbreak of destruction, looting and shooting they had been predicting for weeks.

Coming as a surprise to some, however, there is a huge difference between an organized protest demonstration and an outbreak of hooliganism staged under cover of darkness just for the hell of it.  Because they can.  Because it’s cool or dope or some other stupid adjective for describing willful delinquency. I say it is because they are damned fools who don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground.  How many IQ points does it take to understand that trashing, stealing and burning local businesses that serve ones own community is nothing short of insane?  What are they trying to prove, besides giving credibility to those misguided Americans who are convinced there is something inherently wrong with black people?

I need you, the reader, to understand some things about this latest exercise in judicial futility:

Let’s say we all take on face value the statement made by the DA that the evidence, and lots of it, pointed conclusively to the innocence of Officer Darren Wilson.  Let’s say we accept as fact that Michael Brown assaulted the officer, attempted to take his service revolver inside the patrol car and delivered a number of severe, injurious blows to the cop’s face.

Let’s say we all simply dismiss the multiple eye-witness accounts of the incident outside the patrol car that reported young Brown being shot from the back, turning and raising his hands in apparent surrender, and subsequently being fatally shot in the head.  Let’s all decide those eyewitnesses are, by definition, liars, because they are black and young and in cahoots with all young black men who have the balls to snatch a handful of cigarillos right in front of the storekeeper’s nose and then shoves a tiny man aside as he strides defiantly out the door. 

Let’s say we all agree that Officer Wilson was in fear for his life because Michael Brown was young, large and black.  I, myself, have absolutely no doubt that is true.  Let’s even disregard a recent article in the Daily Kos that demonstrates convincingly that the distance between the shooting officer and the victim, described repeatedly as 35 feet by the police, was actually 148 feet.

Let’s say we let slide the testimony reportedly given to the grand jury that “Office Darren Wilson never stood over” the sun-simmering corpse of Michael Brown, even though we can see clearly that is not true. 







I am willing to concede every last one of these “facts” to those of you who believe Michael Brown’s death was justifiable homicide on the basis of self-defense, if you can explain to me why it took ten rounds to neutralize the perp who was undisputedly unarmed, and why the only choice Wilson had to defend himself from this giant kid who was clearly nuts (as I’m convinced Wilson thought) was to put a bullet in his head and kill him.

I need you to understand that no matter how many different ways you explain to me that the police officer was within his rights to use what I consider excessive force, that Michael Brown still had at least one right – the right to remain alive.

I am not anti-cop.  I am not blindly loyal to all black people, regardless of what dumbass things they might do.  I am not in denial about the cesspools of humanity that produce children with no morals, no sense of right and wrong and no accountability to authority.  I am not in denial that Michael Brown behaved very badly on that fateful day in Ferguson.  I get it. 

What I need you to understand is, I don’t get why Michael Brown had to die.

Another American Icon Crashes and Burns

I hadn’t heard about the rumors before now.  I didn’t know someone had alleged  America’s most loveable father figure was not just a rapist, but a conscious predator.

Then comedian Hannibal Buress, during his recent comedy set in Philadelphia, said this:

"Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches. I've done this bit on stage and people think I'm making it up.... when you leave here, Google 'Bill Cosby rape.' That sh** has more results than 'Hannibal Buress.'"

The bit went viral and our beloved Dr. Cliff Huxtable is tumbling from grace like a boulder.  Cue the talking heads.  Feminists are aghast when another woman dares to suggest that the allegations might not be true.  Many men feel attacked by proxy by the parade of “me,too” victims surfacing on a daily basis.  And corporate America, afraid of its own shadow when it comes to negative publicity, drops Bill Cosby like a hot stone.

The mailman asked me yesterday what I thought about all this.  I tried to reduce my response to one-word descriptions, after a cliché about smoke and fire raced through my head.  Of course, that was impossible, because my thoughts ricochet all over the place and can barely be articulated, much less characterized with one adjective.

I remember all this circusy clamor when Tiger Woods’ furious wife beat the hell out of his luxury car with a nine iron.  Huge icon.  Poster man for all that is good and right with the world.  Tiger freakin’ Woods!  Whatever could he have done to make this crazy-ass woman go postal like that?  Oh, wait.  What?  An affair? Two affairs?  Twelve affairs!?!?!?!?  Who ARE these whores?  They must be looking for hush-money.  Not OUR Tiger!

Here is my interview of myself:

L, do you believe Bill Cosby could be guilty of these allegations?

Of course I do.  Bill Cosby is NOT Cliff Huxtable.  Cliff Huxtable is a fictional character, written from someone else’s imagination in an attempt to portray a politically correct patriarch of a “typical” American family who happen to be black.  Bill Cosby is an actor.  What he portrays on stage or screen gives us absolutely zero insight into Bill Cosby, the man.  We are so easily misled into  embracing the character and disregarding the person behind the character, because none of us know that person.  So, yes, I do think he could be guilty of at least some of these allegations.

L, why have these women waited all these decades to come forward with these claims?

Obviously, I can only guess the answers to this one.  You’d have to ask each one of his accusers why they’ve been relatively silent until now.  My guess is, just like is happening today, they probably knew many would refuse to believe them.  I don’t know if you have noticed this, but all the alleged victims thus far have been white women who were extremely young and presumably ambitious.  Cosby was already one of the most powerful people in Hollywood and most assuredly one of the most powerful black people.  Would these young women appear to be racists if they spoke out?  Would they be shamed and discounted and ultimately ruined?  Probably and probably.

One of the women, Andrea Constand, who was the first to publicly accuse Cosby, was a Temple University basketball player.  Temple is Cosby’s alma mater.  She described in her testimony how Cosby groomed her, offered to mentor her and give her career advice.  She said he drugged her and raped her in her drug-induced stupor.  Cosby settled with the young Canadian out of court.  Today she is a massage therapist in Canada.

It is not difficult for me at all to understand a young woman’s reluctance to step forward with such incendiary accusations against a powerful man.  Many less-than-powerful men -- regular, everyday fathers and grandfathers and uncles and athletic directors – have gotten away with such behavior because the victims are simply not believed if and when they attempt to discuss it.  There is an all-too-common tendency to want to believe the victim has ulterior motives or is mentally disturbed, rather than investigate the possibility that the accused could be guilty.

Hero worship is a concept fraught with land mines.  Behind that NFL jersey or PGA golf hat or actor playing a role is a human being who is just as susceptible to foibles and frailties as the rest of us.  Some of them are even criminals, drug abusers and womanizers.  Some are insensitive to the cruelty of dog fighting or cock fighting.  Some resolve their arguments with their wives and girlfriends with their fists. Some are rapists and murderers.  And some are really, really, good, upstanding family men.  How can we tell the difference?  We can’t.  Because we do not know them at all, despite their presence in our everyday lives.

Am I a Wimp or a Wise Woman?

 

I am feeling quite conflicted this cold, overcast morning.  About a month ago, after several months of non-stop troll activity on Open Salon, the blogging site I’ve used for nearly five years, I had a hissy fit and announced my departure forever. (Note: the site is no longer tended by its owners.  The cover page is a year old and no new members are being admitted.  The place reminds me of the 1960s novel The Lord of the Flies.)

I understand that internet trolls are, for the most part, mentally ill misfits who try to work out their frustrations at the expense of those with whom they disagree (read: progressives).  I know they come with the territory. 

I made it through the first four-plus years without too much flak because I do not resort to ad hominen arguments.  I carefully avoid judgmental adjectives and adverbs.  I stick to what I think and what I think I know.  I offer my opinions and discuss my reasons for having those opinions.  Disagreeing with me is perfectly fine.  Calling me a smug phony or a race baiter or a liar-by-definition-of-my-former-profession is most certainly not. 

I also have a visceral reaction to certain profanity, most often the F-bomb.  I think the looks of sheer horror on the faces of the adults in my family whenever that word was employed by anyone around us deeply embedded themselves into my psyche.  I was convinced (and still am) that only people with limited vocabularies had to resort to such language. 

My indoctrination was so complete that when, in my first year of college,  my dorm mates noticed my visible recoil whenever they dropped the F-bomb (frequently!) they thought that was so funny, they started chanting the word over and over and over again, just to get under my skin.  (The bitches!  LOL)

Anyway, now, a month out from my poetic parody of the song “Take This Job and Shove It,” there are so many things happening that tweak my writing muse and there are so many posts on Open Salon that I still read and have to force myself to withhold comments,  I am starting to regret allowing the handful of hateful baiters to push my buttons far enough to drive me away.  I am, after all, nothing if not a self-control freak!

Yes, the planet will continue to spin without my comments appearing in the threads of the dwindling number of sane writers on OS and/or Our Salon, a new blog site created for OS-fleeing writers.  Of course, nothing stopped some of the trolls from opening accounts there, so there they are again.  But I miss the company of my “imaginary internet friends,” as the wife of one of my virtual friends calls us.  I miss the exchange of ideas and thoughts, the short anecdotal entries and the longer, deep-dive type scholarly works that many offer. 

Another one of the childhood mantras drilled into my head was “do not cut off your nose to spite your face.”  Yeah.  I don’t have to deal with the nasty-tempered haters anymore, which is really good for my health.  But…

Objectivity and Taking Sides

 

I am not known for being indecisive.  I have opinions, some of which are pretty strong and non-negotiable. 

I am absolutely clear about my stance on:

-- abortion (for it), gay rights (for them)

-- public  education (yes. It is the only way to pull people out of generational poverty)

-- racism in America (as if I had to say that!)

-- religion (fine with me, as long as you don’t try to force me to practice yours. I have opted out)

-- taxation (yes, it is necessary to sustain social health, but let’s spread it fairly, which means taxing the rich at least as much as the poor)

-- voting rights (stop trying to suppress the vote, GOP!)

I have been called “opinionated” more than once.  I reply that I think everybody should formulate their opinions on everything controversial in order to make intelligent decisions, so thank you!  I know the word is not meant to be taken in a positive light, but I choose to do so.

But ask me about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and I will fail to choose a side.  It’s not for lack of trying, though.  For the past week and a half I have pored over articles linked to Open Salon posts, and I have read all the comments on posts from both camps.  I have seen opposing videos that make all kinds of sense, but each video argues unequivocally for one side or the other.

I cannot take a side.

Why? Because I refuse to ignore the small and/or the historical details.  Anyone who has the most basic understanding of how Israel came to be should be able to entertain the notion that Israelis may not see things the way we in the US see them.  For us to denounce as “wrong” their strong needs to feel safe and secure in a small country surrounded by many “enemy” countries –countries whose stated purpose is to eliminate the Jewish state -- is hubris at its ugliest. 

Would we tolerate Mexico, for instance, lobbing rockets over the border into Texas or California for more than a day or two?  No matter that the rockets are pretty pitiful in comparison to what we could be returning and no matter that those rockets are “only” killing people in the hundreds as opposed to our perceived and probably real ability to take out several Mexican states at one time, Americans would be screaming at the tops of their lungs for Obama to do something to stop it.

Yes, Israel does look like the Jolly Green Giant to Gaza’s Jiminy Cricket, but do we really expect them to tolerate incoming rockets, day in and day out, sending a majority of the Israeli population to bomb shelters several times a week? We wouldn’t put up with it if it happened once every quarter!  Why do we expect Israel to put up with it?

On the other hand

The long, narrow strip of land called Gaza, situated on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, has 1.816 M people residing, working and fighting within 139 square miles.  My city of Atlanta, Georgia, USA is 132.4 square miles, with roughly 500,000 residents, just to help with perspective. 

When the Israelis drop evacuation leaflets or drop their “knock” bombs, where are the people expected to go?  Schools you say?  That would make sense, since the Israelis are determined to minimize the number of civilian casualties, but the Palestinians elected and put into power members of Hamas, the terrorist organization that has repeatedly vowed to blow Israel off the face of the earth.  And, although this school was actually vacant at the time, 20 Hamas rockets were found stashed in a school building.  It is widely reported that Hamas “hides themselves and their munitions in plain sight,” making collateral damage to women, children and the elderly almost certain.

I am a pushover for a suffering child.  My brain doesn’t work the way it is asked to work by those supporting Israel.  Eighty dead children are 80 dead children.  They have done nothing to anyone.  They didn’t even vote for the terrorist regime!  Telling me what the number of dead would be if Israel actually unleashed their fearsome capabilities does not make me feel better.  My brain understands the point.  My soul cannot.

Hamas is using their own people as human shields.  That is against international law.

Yes, they do seem to be doing that.  So what?  Is that supposed to make me feel resigned to the fact that women and children and the elderly make up far more of the Palestinian casualties than do Hamas operatives?  Am I supposed to be comfortable with the Palestinian voters’ chickens coming home to roost on the heads of their children?

I cannot take a stance.  This is one of the few problems I have encountered that doesn’t seem to have any kind of viable solution.  Because the conflict is based primarily on religious principles, there is little chance for a compromise that will last longer then the failed two hour ceasefire the Palestinians refused to honor.  Logic and rational thought are taking a back seat to differences in belief systems and extremism courtesy of both regimes. 

I have never felt so frustrated.  World wars have started over these kinds of clashes.  We are expected to take a side, when there is no logical side to take. 

And, I’ll admit it.  Sometimes I wonder where the hell this God, this Allah, for whom all this allegedly is staged – where the hell is this entity who is believed to be all-powerful?  I could never believe in a deity that expects its followers to kill in its name.