Dear Kids, December 27, 2005 I blogged about seedsofpeace.org I'm reprinting the entry here with some modifications...
Dear Sage, About a decade ago I saw a very beautiful picture in a news magazine. It showed red haired kids, who were probably your age, shouting excitedly while watching a sporting event (probably football.) It was taken in Northern Ireland, a country bitterly divided between catholics and protestants fighting a bloody civil war. The magazine pointed out that The Kids in the crowd were both Irish Catholics AND Protestants. Theirs was a generation untouched, unsoiled, unbloodied by the violence of the previous ones.
A decade later, Ireland is relatively peaceful (compared to Afghanistan and Iraq.) I can't help but think that those kids have something to do with it.
SeedsOfPeace.Org is an organization whose ideal is to bring Peace to the generations to come. Maybe peace will come slowly, every generation realizing a piece of that dream. Hopefully in yours, there will be more children playing and watching soccer games without caring whether they have red hairs or black, Protestants or Moslems, Children of Southern Developing Countries or Scions of the Northern States.
Exactly 3 years after I've written this entry, on December 27, 2008, Israel started bombing Gaza strip. It has been going on since then and the end is nowhere in sight.
This means that another generation of Palestinians and Israelis are growing up and are seeing each other as Enemies that need to be wiped out from the face of the Earth. This is what their elders are teaching them. It is a lesson that they learn every single day, especially since December 27.
Another tragic footnote to this affair is that when the lameduck president of the US, EX-PRESIDENT W. Bush, was asked to comment about the deaths in Gaza strip, he laid all the blame on the Palestinians. This was taken by Israel as a signal to raise the level of their attack on Gaza with little regard for women and children who are caught in the crossfire.
In all his 8 years in the whitehouse, he only made one speech that is close to being memorable. He said a few years back (in the Rose Garden one sunny afternoon after the news finally reached him about a Palestinian teenager who strapped on a bomb and committed suicide deep inside Israel) these words:
"When an 18-year-old Palestinian girl is induced to blow herself up, and in the process kills a 17-year-old Israeli girl, THE FUTURE ITSELF IS DYING."
With EX-PRESIDENT W. Bush's careless comment, he made sure that the FUTURE ITSELF CAN NOT BE RAISED FROM THE DEAD.
Please Pray for Palestine and Israel and all the victims of his failed foreign policies.
To Sage, Sabe, Sade & 3Stan
WELCOME!
2 comments:
grabe! i remember watching cnn nung bakasyon and yan ang news. kaawa sila
clinton was caricatured as being carried out of the white house sitting on a couch, on the phone. his line? "hurry up, we have a few minutes more to hammer out a deal."
clinton worked so hard to get a deal forged, and time magazine wrote about those sleepless nights they worked for a peace deal.
too bad bush didn't understand. too bad condi had to deal with him and cheney. too bad they didn't listen to powell and others who saw the US's role in the middle east.
now it's up to barack to undo what wasn't done the past eight years.
too bad. i have friends on both sides of the fence and all i can do is pray for them.
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