"For if you think that by killing men you can avoid the accuser censuring your lives, you are mistaken; that is not the way of escape which is either possible or honorable; the easiest and noblest way is not crushing others, but to be improving yourselves" --Plato, "Apology" (Socrates' Defense)
This week has been a bloody, fiery week. It's been a week of buses being re-routed, parades being re-routed, and lives of human beings--yes, human beings--being re-routed. So you won't have to guess what the above statements hint at, I'll tell you.
Yesterday, my bus was re-routed, from its usual course through one of Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, on the way home from the university due to the violent and non-violent protests of ultra-Orthodox Jews (in their own neighborhoods, thankfully) against the gay pride parade set to take place this Friday. Last year's parade was marred by the stabbings of three marchers. This year, it is not uncommon to see posters in certain neighborhoods advertising a reward of 20,000 shekels for anyone who kills a marcher. I wonder, "Is it possible that I live in a city like this?" I wonder, "Did the people in Selma, Alabama have this thought, too?"
The parade--or the "parade," since as I write this, the Israeli Supreme Court is in session to determine whether a "safe" parade can indeed take place in our city--was given a new route yesterday. The original route by-passed the aforementioned neighborhoods. The second route by-passes them even more.
Oh, but don't worry. The number of people within Israel who hate each other has not yet exceeded the number who hate each other across the formal and informal borders of the country. The numbers of those killed in Gaza by a misfired Israeli artillery shell this morning continue to go up as well (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/785380.html). As do the number of Palestinian women who are sexually, physically, and emotionally abused according to a recent report by the Human Rights Watch (http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2006/11/palestinian-authority-ignores-violence.php).
I think about the US mid-term elections, whose results have just about come in by now. I think about the issues on the ballot and in the news. And I think to myself, "If only we could think about 'stem-cell research' here. If only the minimum wage was the biggest thing on our minds here." But I realize that America's continued presence in Iraq (and Afghanistan, has everyone forgotten Afghanistan) is life-and-death just like the things facing us here. But it's on the other side of the world compared to America--oh, right, it's in our neighborhood--it seems less real.
I was always told--and sometimes I still believe it--that the world is not any more violent now than it was throughout world history. "We just have news now--up-to-date, live feed, instantaneous broadcast news--that brings hunger, poverty, massacres, and terrorism to our doorsteps faster than the pizza delivery man can bring us a sardine-and-onion thin-crust pie." But proximity to the violence makes me think otherwise.
So, what do we do? No, no really, what do we do--to improve the chance (if not the reality) of peace, to guarantee (if not living to an old age) at the least the chance to graduate from high school, to value life in such a way that forces us to change our trajectory course that we claim was set so long ago but that in reality we choose anew every day?
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