Humanity?

 I can’t be silent on this anniversary, but I am at a loss for words. This world is hurting. People can be so cruel. All people have the potential to be cruel. But we also have the power to be deeply kind. I’m writing with the strength of having seen kindness to ponder immense evil.

Antisemitism sucks and October 7th is just one of many wrongs wrought upon the Jewish people. War sucks and I grieve for all families and individuals living in fear and waking with grief. I rage for centuries of racism and societies built on injustices.

I worry for the remaining hostages holed up underground, the freed ones living with PTSD, and the families of lives taken so violently.

I despair for peace and yet I must believe in it and work for it. I just don’t know how. Where do we go from here?

This is not a question of Israel and Palestine or Ukraine and Russia or Black and White or Democrat and Republican. This is a question of how can we see that each of us has worlds within, hopes and dreams, fears and inconsistencies, whimsy and mischief. How can the child in me see the child in you? How can our inner idealisms become and outer reality? Why must power struggles, misinformation, and tools of violence get in the way?

This is not just a question of now, or last year on this date, or even this century. How is humanity so beautiful that we can boast Beethoven’s Ninth and the Sistine Chapel—- and so gruesome that our history books carry so much shame? Where is there hope in the rubble?

I see my students and I know that right now, they expect kindness and fairness. They also know better than to continue schoolyard fights with “he started it!”…. They learn in school about how to “come back to calm”, and as they grow, the learn about restorative justice.

How can we harness the faith of the youth and create a better world? Something has to change.

Please, free those hostages. End this war. End these wars and prejudices and injustices. See one another. Humanity can do better.