Carol Bergman

As veterans return from foreign wars, they find a nation that uncomfortably mirrors the conflict zones they left behind: communities fractured and exploited by extreme voices.

-Jake Harriman,  Marine Corps, co-founder of +More Perfect Union, in Stars & Stripes 1/27/25

If it is true—according  to climatologists— that every forest fire in the world is everyone's forest fire, that there is only one planetary forest fire, then  it follows that every war in the world also has no boundary, that every war is my war, and your war. Images of a flattened Gaza are reminiscent of Tokyo after the American bombing on March 9, 1945,  and images of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, destroyed by Russian forces on May 26, 1995, are reminiscent of Gaza and Gaza is reminiscent of Tokyo and Grozny. Choose images of any war—even London during the Blitz—and you will find survivors digging through rubble, searching for remnants of their lives, for the bodies of their neighbors and relatives,  for beloved family pets, for food and clean water.

Images transfix but they also anesthetize, Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography.  We gaze at suffering on oversized screens from the comfort of our living rooms. We get up to make some tea, but even before this impulse, the still image or the eerie drone images have vanished from the screen. The war is here, and then it is gone; it has become ephemera.

If we are able for a moment, or a day, to contemplate our one precious life on earth interlocked with other precious lives on earth, the image of children walking over the rubble searching for bodies, or food, or water may say to us: "pause."  In this contemplation, every avaricious war is a crime, and every arms dealer—individual, corporate, or nation state—is a war criminal.

I am a child of refugess from war and I am drawn to the heroism and right actions—in the Buddhist sense—of humanitarian workers who risk their lives to protect civilians, return them to health, or bring them to safety. They work in the interstices of conflict, in the afflicted neighborhoods of our cities, in the countryside, all over the world.

When Fascism came to Europe, citizens were unprepared for war as a consequence of Fascism. When Communism came to Russia, citizens were unprepared for the Gulag. When Project 2025 came to America, no one imagined a masked paramilitary army, or deportations, or children starving, or the capitulation of revered institutions, or students unable to attend colllege, or families unable to access medical care in what was once the "richest nation on earth."

There is always an earthquake preceding a tsunami. We must gather our energy, our wisdom, and our determination, to resist the rising tide of hatred and oppression.