Life As A Picnic

  It is Friday 2:00 a.m in Israel and the new moon is not yet re-born.
That's how we call the night of the new moon ("Yareah") in Hebrew: The rebirthing of the moon. "Molad Hayareah". But then, the holiday ("Hag") some might call Christmas, is named in Hebrew: "Hag Hamolad".

I'm reading so many blogs, and Eric Olsen's Blogcritics for sure - especially all those touching on the imminent war - since it so happens that for me the issue is a bit too close home.

I sense an eagerness in USA to get "this" (the war, of course) done with. I recognize the pattern, first the urgent messages from high above and then, when our mind is broken into pieces, made to believe war after war that this one is the final and last one, the final destruction of the Devil to be followed by Peace on Earth.
Then, unable to stand the pressure anymore, all we want is to have it done with, come what might come.

So one question is ringing throughout the virtual word: When?
The question on my mind, and on the mind of so many in my country and region is rather, Will the new moon give birth to salvation or to darkness?

Because, you see, I know just that I do not know the truth, I have no direct access to information. All I know, directly, from a lifetime spent in the prison named War On Earth in which the few days that carried some semblance of repose were just a short reprieve - is that war brings death and suffering to the innocents. No distraction. Destruction.

And I do not know, I am totally baffled: How come that with such advanced technology that can track down every single truck, how come no way is found to track down Saddam Hussein and his not that many loyal soldiers? Why is there a need to burn forest after forest in order to kill a few snakes?

And why, why is there such a need to go as far as Iraq, in order to bring peace to the Middle East? Isn't Israel, geographically, closer than Iraq to USA and Europe? So, while on their way, why not stop first here as Carter managed to do not badly at all some twenty years ago?

When I read Eric's quotation of Gen. Tommy Franks: "We'll do our best to avoid noncombatant casualities, and I will tell you, we will not be 100 percent successful - I cannot but think, Does he mean me in Tel-Aviv as well?

In my mind, what I see is the world as a big theatre (Yes, I know, Shakespeare had plagiarized me of late).
High above and all around in the balconies and all over the stairs sit people from all the far away countries, waiting for "action". In the no grass field stand the Allies facing the Enemy.

In between sits Corinna, knowing deep in her bones that it is not a picnic.

During the Lebanon War, the Israeli soldiers took some famous songs and changed the words a bit. I've arranged them as in a collage and implemented in a chapter of my recently published Sodot novel (Secrets, or A Minyan of Lovers):

"...In a red dress with two braids in her hair a little girl in a Beirut bomb shelter stood there and asked: Why at all? And all the canons and all the soldiers, and all the grown-ups and all the sages and all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't come up with an answer again.
In a red dress with two braids in her hair the daughter of a soldier fighting up there stood up and asked: How many more? And all the volcanoes and all the storms and all the lions and all the tigers and all the grown-ups and all the sages and all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't come up with an answer again..."

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posted by Unknown at 7:12 AM