The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Carl Heintze

Peace continues to elude the world

Sometimes these mornings I wake from a dream which I seem to remember--almost, a dream that promises me ultimate enlightenment, and I lie in bed wondering if it will come to me if I wait long enough.

It's a lovely feeling, as if somehow God will soon impart to me the answer to his ultimate mysteries, as if I will on this or on some morning soon wake to find why the world does as it does, what my part in it is and what is to happen to it.

But this morning is not such a morning.

In Egypt Muslim "fundamentalists" have for the third or fourth time shot up a bus filled with innocent tourists and then have been gunned down themselves by Egyptian police pursuing them into the desert.

On the same morning the bodies of four innocent Americans whose only crime seems to have been being Americans in Pakistan came home for burial.

In the United States the prime minister of Israel has told a Jewish convocation that, yes, all Jews are equal, except in Israel some are more equal than others, but all Jews would be equal if they would just all believe the same things.

In Israel itself, riots mark the funeral of an Arab boy shot by Israeli soldiers, a boy whose parents have donated his vital organs to three Israeli children. Some people on either side of this divided country do not seem to think it right that three lives have been saved.

In Iraq, where the Father of all Middle Eastern trouble continues to outwit the efforts of all who would do him in, the Iraqis are talking about negotiations, but no one--at least in the United States--believes them, and a second aircraft carrier is about to arrive, planes at the ready, in the Persian Gulf.

I rise to contemplate this and other mysteries: that the Civil Rights Commission's proposed new head is not acceptable because he favors civil rights and affirmative action; that the United States is officially for human rights in other countries, especially China, but won't sign a treaty banning land mines; that the number of special prosecutors looking into the way the federal executive branch operates may soon outnumber attorneys for the Justice Department; and that the president of the most powerful nation on earth is busy, as he has been for years now, defending himself against the charges of a young woman about whom he denies most everything.

I try to imagine what it must be like to be angry enough to take a machine gun and mow down people you have never met and who have never knowingly done you any harm, but it is just impossible.

I try to imagine what it must be like to be so firmly committed by faith, tradition and life that you can shut out all others who do not believe as you do, that, indeed, you wish to exclude them from your life at any cost. But it just doesn't work. There's no one and no group that I hate that much.

And although television delivers me glimpses of the carnage of the morning, when I step outside into the warming California sun to see a sky washed blue and fresh after the rain, that world, the world I do not yet understand, is all as unreal as the X-Files and somehow even more bizarre.

A friend of mine declares that God condones violence, else why would we slaughter animals for meat, or why would animals slaughter one another to survive? But I tell him without firm conviction that God intended us for better things, that he wanted us to be an expression of good and love, that we were put upon the earth to find a way to understand one another.

I tell him that it's not so much that God condones violence as it is that we refuse to see it is we who inflict the indignities of humanity upon ourselves, it is we who are given the chance to live in peace and harmony, but it is also we who seem to avoid it at all costs--and the costs are high.

And in the end I am forced to fall back on the knowledge that we are as imperfect as the other creatures which inhabit our planet, and even though we have succeeded in bridging the oceans, we have yet to build bridges between ourselves with any success.

But I go to bed at night hoping, still hoping that when I awake tomorrow morning that elusive dream I have dreamt, the dream that promises me fundamental enlightenment, is coming, is only a nighttime away. And I go to sleep.

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