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A few different perspectives:
>> “If you have less empathy toward victims because of how you feel about their government, propaganda is working on you.” ~ Ben Sheehan
>> I am an Israeli Member of This Community, and I am Scared.
>> What Hamas did was Horrible & so is what Israel has been doing to Palestinians for Years.
>> For Israel, Palestine & Everyone who’s on the Side of Humanity.
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My grandmother lost two children during the Holocaust:
A two-year-old girl and a newborn boy.
This happened because my grandmother and her children were viewed by some people as “them.”
They were “the other”—”not us.”
This left a wound so profound in my family that we haven’t been able to process it.
Until now.
In the last week, I’ve been experiencing intense stress, fear, and profound sadness. I’ve been triggered by current events into what feels like grieving this intergenerational trauma.
I am mindful to ground in my body and let the intense pain and tears pass through me.
It is easy to channel the pain, fear, and sense of helplessness I experience into thoughts of picking sides and discharging that pain and anger on others.
So I try to ground in my body and not get polarized. I try not to get so disregulated that I need to pick a side.
Whenever we cope with the horror we witness by choosing a side, we side with who we think is right against who we think is wrong.
This numbs us from seeing that both sides are being harmed. There are innocent people on both sides.
What we are witnessing in the news is not current events.
This is old karmic patterns repeating.
The only way to prevent further suffering is to disrupt the way things have always been done before.
Israeli children and Palestinian children are our children!
There is no such thing as “us” and “them.” We are all human family. Please let us remember that.
For as long as there’s division, my children—our children—will never be safe.
I am starting to understand that my children’s safety is illusory and precarious if other women’s children remain unsafe.
It’s easy to stay attached to beliefs we’ve been raised with. To perpetuate the dynamics that continue to create so much suffering.
Please let us learn the lessons of the past. Let us question the beliefs we grew up on, so we do not perpetuate cycles of suffering.
Every person who kills, kidnaps, tortures, and oppresses other humans was someone’s baby once, born through a woman.
No one is born a terrorist.
Each child is born into a family, a culture, a religion, an ideology, a history, and a set of circumstances.
Centuries of traumatized people breed more traumatized people. Patterns repeat until they are alchemized and transformed. So much human suffering at the hands of religion and politics—those are beliefs!
And beliefs can be questioned and changed.
Many generations of toxic programming and structures have reduced the complexity of human experience to simplistic judgments of good/bad, black/white, right/wrong.
No matter the culture or geographical region where we’ve been raised, we’ve been led to believe that there’s “us” and “them.”
Nurtured on stories from previous centuries, we are conditioned to think that we cannot love a person from the “them” camp, as it would make us disloyal to “us.”
This same tribal loyalty teaches us to love our own children in such a way that to protect them we must be prepared to kill children of people from the other camp.
The society which we’ve inherited is built on wars: internationally, nationally, in our neighborhoods, and in our own homes.
Something new has to start happening. A different order of thinking, communicating, acting.
No war ever brought lasting peace. It’s time to be human.
Let us question the stories about the world and other people in it that we have we been raised on. Let us review the stories we’ve been passing on to our children.
Many of the “truths” we received with our mothers’ milk, upon questioning reveal themselves as grave untruths.
The old paradigm of the way we’ve been doing life is being revealed in all of its toxicity to us daily.
And as our society shifts, our value system begs to be revisited.
We are being called to go inward, to find our voice, and to be active participants for the change we all wish to see in this world.
My heart hurts witnessing the suffering of people in the images I see on the news. My heart responds equally to crying and wounded children, women and men, whether in Israel or Gaza.
Each human life is equally precious. Each human deserves a life of peace and fulfillment.
The change I want to see in the world? More compassion and understanding, and less war—internationally, nationally, in our neighborhoods, and in our own homes.
That starts with each one of us.
With this post, I go first.
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