Gratitude Monday: alternatives

What to be grateful for today—two days after the assault by the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas, on Israel; that’s the question.

We’ve had two and a half years of Vladimir Putin’s three-day “military exercise” in Ukraine, with the arrogant atrocities and war crimes by Russian forces. I’d just digested reports on the village of Hroza, where a missile strike deliberately targeted a funeral service, killing 52 civilians and requiring that they use excavators to enlarge their small cemetery to accommodate the new burials. And then, Saturday morning, I woke up to video of the coordinated attack from Gaza into Israel, with the invaders murdering civilians and taking hostages.

Honestly—do the rules of war mean nothing anymore? /s

Naturally, according to Republicans (who never met a crisis they couldn’t spin into a bizarre, utterly false, talking point), Biden is somehow responsible for this.

Israel has retaliated, as was probably the point of the Hamas exercise, and we’re in for quite the shitshow. It will be ugly—metastatic ugly. I can’t stop thinking of something Gandhi said: an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.

And it feels to me like we’re getting there at a rate of knots.

So, for gratitude today, I’m reaching out to nature. I’m grateful that—unlike millions in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and Lebanon (at time of writing)—I can turn off the images and sounds of war, step out into my (so-far) peaceful neighborhood and see on an entirely different kind of show, where the fire is in the leaves and in the sunrise on the clouds.