He stands in a dusty field facing a barbed wire fence and he calls the name of his son out loud. Through his binoculars he can see people three kilometers away - a crowd of people facing him. They also look across the barbed wire, and they also call out the names of their sons. This is the scene at the border between Gaza and Israel. Jews and Palestinians, with packages in hand for their sons held in each others' prisons. The packages will go undelivered. These parents can see each other, and they wave to one another.
"I fell close to my son here," says one father. "Close in distance, but far away in time. It has been twelve hundred days and nights ..." The haunting sound across the barren landscape - echoing like the Muslim Athan, like the Christian Angelus, like the Jewish Shophar - each voice in its own way a call for peace, a yearning for their sons and daughters ... dare I suggest it... Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more ..."
President Barack Obama has made the call to the appropriate heads of state in the Czech Republic and Poland - The "Missile Defense System" is not going to happen. The news brings despair to some, delight to others. The Russians have won, but can they be trusted?
People peering across borders wondering if armies will invade. And nowadays the "army" can be mustered thousands of miles away and the attack delivered in a matter of minutes, seconds. But America's president wants to put the missiles down.
Perhaps the best way for "defense" to happen - our own and our neighbors - is for all of us to put the missiles down, and deliver the packages. This won't solve all the problems. We don't have to make sentimental pretensions that everything is just fine. We don't have to reduce the complexities of the world's problems, the people's suffering, the injustices heaped upon the poor into pious euphemisms. We can still do the hard work of diplomacy, tackle the political challenges of compromise, stand our moral ground.
But really, what good can possibly be compromised and how is national pride threatened by putting the missiles down and delivering the packages?
President Barack Obama has made the call to the appropriate heads of state in the Czech Republic and Poland - The "Missile Defense System" is not going to happen. The news brings despair to some, delight to others. The Russians have won, but can they be trusted?
People peering across borders wondering if armies will invade. And nowadays the "army" can be mustered thousands of miles away and the attack delivered in a matter of minutes, seconds. But America's president wants to put the missiles down.
Perhaps the best way for "defense" to happen - our own and our neighbors - is for all of us to put the missiles down, and deliver the packages. This won't solve all the problems. We don't have to make sentimental pretensions that everything is just fine. We don't have to reduce the complexities of the world's problems, the people's suffering, the injustices heaped upon the poor into pious euphemisms. We can still do the hard work of diplomacy, tackle the political challenges of compromise, stand our moral ground.
But really, what good can possibly be compromised and how is national pride threatened by putting the missiles down and delivering the packages?
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