Humanize the Earth!

I have lots to write about after my trip to Denmark and the Netherlands. Here are topics rolling around in my head:

• LocalNames and WordPress plugin
• Future of Wiki Conferences
• Opening Space at a traditional conference
• Inviting others to build groups in the Humanist Movement
• Air travel and terrorism
• BeyondYes, large-scale decision-making

For now, I’m jetlagged like crazy and will give you only this link to a revamped website of Council 257 of the Humanist Movement

Doug writes:

What, you don’t think that “simply” talking can cure the violence? Well, then, what good has throwing more bombs and fists accomplished? If that does not work but we keep doing it, do we not label ourselves as insane?

That seems to relate very nicely to the conversation on-going in the comments about my last post.

www.silo.net www.silomessage.org silosmessage-ny.net

Danny Zuckerbrot – on the Mideast Crisis

I am a Jew and a child of the holocaust. That means that most of the grandparents, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and family friends I might have known were cruelly tortured and killed before I was born. It means I grew up knowing the scars on my father’s body, the memories left by the whips of the concentration camp guards. I knew his limbs twisted from their beatings. It means I will never forget the numbers tattooed into his arm that marked him as a slave, and less than a slave. It means I will always remember the nightmares that haunted his dreams.

It also means that I am descended from people whose neighbors in every generation for hundreds of years have turned on them in pogroms, and massacres. Before Columbus sailed, we were driven from Spain. Two centuries before that from England. It is a story of exile and rejection that has been two thousand years in the telling; nor has it ended. In the tranquil and tolerant city where I grew up there were places with signs that said no Jews or Dogs.

I understand those who cannot trust their well being even to their apparent allies. I know in my bones who it is that will end up being the scapegoat, the fall guy, the accused. I am a Jew, in the same way that I am a part of the family I was born into. And I find myself one of those who asks; why didn’t they protest when a thousand missiles where launched at us from our neighbors house?

I feel all that is true and I ask myself isn’t it right to defend yourself? Isn’t it right to defend your children?

I have no wisdom to illuminate this situation only this register and this observation:

I have to defend my children, my family, my people. But who are my children? Who are my family, and my people?

My heart is pierced by every bullet that rips apart that one who, like me, simply finds themselves thrown into a game they didn’t choose. I am torn apart with every single person who cowers in fear or shakes their fist in helplessness. Even if I would, the tears I shed for that child cruelly slaughtered by a bomb don’t know how to distinguish between Jew and Muslim, between white or black, or Hindu or Sikh.

This war is a disaster. All war is a disaster. All violence impossible.