I am experiencing an interesting conundrum.

 

Whenever I post anything pro-Palestinian, I am accused of anti-Semitism. Whenever I post anything pro-Israel, I am accused of being anti-Palestinian.

 

  I am anti-neither.

 

I am PRO-WORKING OUT DIFFERENCES IN WAYS THAT EXCLUDE KILLING ONE ANOTHER!

 

Echoes of 911

 

I remember back to the months following 911 and the terror attack on New York and the Pentagon. Those of us who didn’t want to see Bush and cronies unleashing a scattershot retaliation against a country that DID NOT attack us on 911 were accused of being unpatriotic.

 

What a load of horse shit.

 

It’s happening again with the Israel-Hamas conflict.  If I empathize or sympathize with the barbarity being perpetrated on either side, the other side accuses me of being anti-them.

 

I AM ANTI-KILLING INNOCENT CIVILIANS!!!

 

The vast majority of civilians in harm’s way in Gaza and in Israel aren’t doing anyone any harm. They’re merely trying to survive despite the rage, carnage, and destruction that has been unleashed on them by political entities on the other side. 

 

Governments wage war, not civilians

 

Whenever the USA wages war, indiscriminately killing thousands of innocent civilians without conscience and without every degree of mitigation possible to protect noncombatant civilians, I am always going to pitch a bitch and demand a halt to the chaos. My taxes (entirely without my consent) pay for their weapons, and I expect the same of other citizens within their countries.  Any time killing is deemed “necessary,” there had better be major constraints and conditions put on the enlisted killers.

 

Without it, they engage in documentable war crimes.

 

So, let me be clear. I am anti-war.  I don’t care who’s waging it, or for what reason.

 

As a thinking animal, surely every human realizes that killing others only increases animosity. Until we decide to settle our differences in non-lethal, mutually beneficial ways, none of us will ever be safe.

 

Perhaps this is pie in the sky thinking, but unless enough of us do it (and insist our governments do it, too) to finally tip the scales in favor of SANITY, some authoritarian tyrant will destroy this planet and everything on it that lives and breathes.  And then it will be too late to figure this out.

 

WAR IS MADNESS.

 

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world (of armaments) is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The only way to win World War III is to prevent it.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

“A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn’t preventive war; that is war.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

“I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower