Arabs and Their Problems; Looking Out Living in Peace

    I wanted to be involved years ago, trying through official U.S. channels of testing, interviews, and colleague candidate competition to be among the State Department's diplomats. My plan was to get in on the bottom rung, work myself up to be a peacemaker for my country, my planet. Intercede in the violent conflicts and wage some calm between the hostile parties. It did not work out like that. I tried; perhaps not hard enough. What amounts to enough, was not then. Maybe I will have another shot someday, to be in such a position? Less likely. Perhaps I will be a permanent sideline witness to the horrors and travails of the millions who suffer and die across the globe.

    If I had perhaps succeeded in the early 2000s, and had I become some interlocutor among the nations, somehow representing our great land and its ideals, attempting to enforce peace in conflicts like those of the Israelis and the Palestinians, maybe I would only be another person to be ignored or ridiculed to think that Israeli Jewish citizens and Palestinian Arabs could get along without all the venom and death.

    Some think that the Holy Bible prophecies amount to so much agony and catastrophe, that there is no point in stopping the factions, that it is all a fait accompli.

    I disagree. I believe that we who live now could make a difference in peace negotiations in Israel and Palestine, and a lot of other places of violence and destruction. It does not have to be this bad. But others throw their hands up and say there is no hope. That we cannot avoid so much appalling blow by blow. Too many people dying and suffering, on all sides, there is nothing that we or others can do to stop it. 

    I demure. I dissent. I do not concur, that there is no hope. There are opportunities for us to help. There are reasons that we could craft and enforce to encourage hope and the will for peace, without the hate and malice. Some say we have no influence. That is wrong. We have a huge hand in what happens between the differing parties.

    But sadly, most of us Americans do not have the vision nor fortitude to make it happen. We lack for a lot.

    And, I am a part of the problem of no solution. Because I have not put myself in the position to be an effective tool of dialog, or maker of reconciliatory negotiations.

    I have not learned Arabic well enough. I have not advanced in my professional positions enough. I have not read enough, nor published enough, nor analyzed and pushed my thoughts enough.

    We-- I am a cypher in the sense of helping the situation. Wishful notions, all left whistling and sobbing in the night air. 

    Notions lying motionless with the thousands of dead and soon to die. The ever-marching cycle of wanton despair.

    This Holy Land which cannot be holy nor sacred.