An age-old dilemma – what are the parameters and justice when a people are conquered? The answer is there is no justice. It is a mess - for a long time. You kill my family now I kill yours. Everyone can claim to be a victim. It’s the Hatfields and the MacCoys – a generational feud. From the outside, it seems insane, but from the inside, it’s full of pain, hatred, and righteousness consuming the minds of those involved.

This tendency to fight over resources goes back to the very beginning of the human race. There is a reason there are no more Neanderthals. One group took over another group and it probably wasn’t pretty – were talking about clubbing a person to death. The pigmies in Africa used to be widespread but there are hardly any of that race left. How many Aboriginal people died with the takeover of what is now called North America, South America, and Australia, not to mention modern-day conquered Tibet or Mongolia? The Earth is fertilized by the bones of our ancestors.

When Jane Goodall, who studied gorillas and was convinced of their gentle nobility, witnessed a band of male gorillas attack and beat to death a stray gorilla from another clan, she said that just because brutality was in our genetic line doesn’t mean we cannot overcome it. We can choose to be different.

There are large areas of peace in today’s world, even with all of the wars and violence, we are living in a far more peaceful world than a thousand years ago. Even just a hundred years ago we were in World War I and II. 50 million people died in World War II. That’s more than anything we have seen recently, even with Covid.

So now we have a war that makes people really upset. Is it the Ukraine war? The war in Sudan? The military takeover of Niger? No, even though over 9,000 people have died in each of these wars.  No, I’m talking Israel. This really hits a cord with the media and the hearts of Americans.

Is it a Jewish thing? A white thing? Or is it that we feel responsible because it was the allied nations that made Israel after World War II (even though there were people living on the land we gave, but you know, they were brown and Islamic, so who cares. -Right?)

To be aware and horrified is to be human, but we need to put it in perspective.  With our instantaneous-doom-a-day news, it’s easy to feel bad. Kindness is small and insignificant to exploding buildings and dead bodies. Hard to report about the fabric of trust, kindness, and love that is suspending our societies and making everything work.

We do have a flip side. Kill someone’s family and the sweetest person turns into a raving killer or spirals down into deep depression, but some turn it around into positive action. These people are what give us hope for the human race; Nelson Mandela, Black Elk, Greta Thumberg, and in our local area -Charmaine Lawson.   

Fighting and killing will probably go on as long as there are resources and differences to fight over. But with the human population numbers at an all-time high of 8 billion, I think we need to congratulate ourselves that we are, in proportion, being fairly peaceful. In one year 1.6 million people die from violence in the world. That is only .02% of the world population. And even if we say that ten people are directly affected by that violence it raises it to .2% - not even close to 1%. Every time I hear someone say that the world is going crazy and that they think humanity is falling apart I want to say .02%.

We’re doing pretty good.

I pray for the people suffering in this world. Here is a song to celebrate the 99.8% who are experiencing a peaceful life.