–this morning on facebook (thanks Susanna) — Power to the Peaceful’s image

Today.  Right now.  Palestinian people and all people in and around the area of Israel known as Gaza — the Syrian people, Afghan people and people in too many other places on the planet to list here are in immediate danger.  Some are dying.  People = children, youth, and adults including mothers, fathers, grandparents, great grandparents.  These people have pets, they live in places where other animals live, they drink water and they breathe air.  We know this, but we don’t want to.

When a few people become armed and angry from some rationalized place of righteous superiority coupled with searing (and generally unacknowledged) fear, hell actually does break loose.  Too often – really most often — this hell is sustained and perpetuated by people who are neighbors.  And now, given the technical advances in our relatively small and dearly precious world, it is increasingly obvious that, finally we are all neighbors.

There’s talk in the U.S. social media these days of secession — of civil war.  It’s not new talk, but it’s surfaced more publicly since the recent election.  And there is no doubt we are entirely capable of destroying ourselves. I just googled ‘2012 wars’ and found this among the many options that came up.  This image makes me sweat.  It makes tears come to my eyes.  We are better than this and I, as many of us, know this from direct experience.

Here are some voices from the region most devastated by the last US Civil War — the one that cost the real lives of 1/3 of our country’s sons, lovers, husbands and fathers in uniform — the one that cost countless other lives of other real and treasured people.  Chapter 5 of the podcast series holds the voices and insights of a  librarian from rural Arkansas, my 86-year-old uncle and a radio talk show host from Jackson, Mississippi and a religious and civil rights leader from Montgomery, Alabama.

Please listen.  I’m guessing you too will be inspired by these people, their hopes and experiences.

There is so much room for knowing and being in the world, in lives, differently.  There are great options to things like civil war — to horror and annihilation.  We also know this, and we can claim and enact the courage to join together — to see the actual vulnerability we all share just by virtue of that miracle of being born.