We saw Markos Miller, our favorite candidate for mayor of Portland, plus a lot of other peaceniks as we hiked the mile to our designated spot near Interstate-295. Along the way my sister in PINK Pat Taub explained why she was joining in on behalf of her young grandchildren.
A highway worker ignored Mark climbing on the sign post next to southbound I-295, but at least one passing motorist honked in greeting.
As twilight gave way to night we could see points of light along the shore stretching in both directions. A bicyclist passed us holding his light aloft. Back at the parking area we saw our friend El-Fadel Arbab, who was a lost boy of Sudan that found his calling traveling around speaking to young people about raising their voices against genocide. He will be at UMaine Presque Isle this week speaking to about 1,000 young people in total.
We're all in this together, people. Either we bring the light, or the forces of darkness will close over all of us.
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"The day is coming, and indeed is already here," when Israel's gentile sycophants will be required to contribute to the critical process by which Israel joins the modern world and ends its psychodramatic rite of denial. But these supernumeraries might be the least likely to contribute: these Sergeant Schultzes and their "I see nothing, I know nothing." Their utility to a reforming Israel would be nil, unless bollards are required on the wharf to tie up ships: "here, stand here, hold this rope, and don't move for two months".
For instance, at the moment Israel is jumping through its hoolahoop as confrontation with Turkey and Egypt accelerates synergistically. And so of course the US is jumping in tandem, viz., the stock markets' plungings and heavings amid ridiculous business-page ruminations about German bureaucratic maneuverings on the euro, when we all know (am I wrong?) that Israel is punishing anybody it can reach in order to get them to get Egypt and Turkey to crawl back into their respective mothers' wombs. That attempt has about run its course.
This is a wonderful opportunity for Israel to show it is serious about reform, for instance by not going to bomb someone or other as a matter of long-standing principle. So far it has not done so (for a week). Watch the stock market for rises (or falls) not explained by obvious economic factors.
Israel will increasingly welcome the new calm even though it thereby, in old Israel terms, acquiesces in humiliation by silently enduring Egyptian and Turkish displays of anger (these stock-market displays aside--that battalion has not quite gotten the word yet). By enduring those displays without lashing out (and even these stock market pyrotechnics are a way of acknowledging that anger), Israel legitimizes that anger, which is the path to peace, since Israel has been the moving party in sixty years of uncivil offensiveness (as were its sponsors in the decades before 1948). Acknowledgment by all parties that Israel "started it" is the path to ending "it".
Gentile sycophants should not take this current momentary calm as vindication of their know-nothing, do-nothing tactics. This calm is the time to envision this anti-hysteria--anti-crisis-stoking--as the new Zionism, leading to a secular unified state of Palestine, where Jewish security rests on civil rights ("not civil wrongs," you contribute nervously?--not a bad try).
US racism has been the parent of modern Israel. For every rabble-rouser dangling a member of the despised community from a tree there are a hundred polite enablers at church teas and school board meetings making that rabble-rousing respectable---making it, indeed, the law of the land. Those are the psychodynamics of the lynch mob.
Israel stands now to disband that lynch mob, once and for all. Why? Because it has no other course open to it. And because it wants to live.
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