The Real World

The world is not the dream world of our stories; it is a narrative being played out, and our stories should attempt to stay close to the real world story. A case in point is the thread: War is Hell. We have seen President Bush try to prove War is not Hell, rather it is a slam-dunking cakewalk and a picnic in the park. It did not work. Many Jews and their paid friends have stories about the new age of Judaism after 1948. However, reality is something different: Ha'aretz IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement By Amos Harel Haaretz Correspondent http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072040.html During Operation Cast Lead, Israeli forces killed Palestinian civilians under permissive rules of engagement and intentionally destroyed their property, say soldiers who fought in the offensive... The testimonies include a description by an infantry squad leader of an incident where an IDF sharpshooter mistakenly shot a Palestinian mother and her two children... "The sharpshooter ...shot them straight away. In any case, what happened is that in the end he killed them...I don't think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to ... I don't know how to describe it .... The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers.. He was just following orders. Let that sink in. I shall say it once more: we are a nation of fools. When we are not fools, we are cunningly depraved. Our support of Israel and our experience with the Israel lobby has degraded both of us. Instead of helping each other, we conspired to enable each other in the most vicious habits. And the debts we have caused to accumulate are going to be paid, as they have begun to be paid now. As we watch the lords of empire scatter across the face of the earth, driven from their Tower of Babel, the debts are being paid. After the lords of empire are driven forth, we yeomen of empire will have our turn. God does not do this. We do it ourselves. God does not have to destroy the proud and arrogant. Their own deeds destroy them. Consider how mighty was the force of Irony - reversal of fortune - when in 2008 the mighty American Empire which was to be the sum total of History forever ( according to Karl Rove...but, of course, he was such an idiot) experienced the first installment on its debt: the collapse of the American financial system. That is what happened. The bloody thing fell down. A so-called literary term- Irony - seemed to step out of college Lit. 101 courses and it swung a mighty axe at the Neo-con dream...and the whole fabric of lies fell apart! All we had to do was wait for the best and the brightest of Americans - who all seem to have a fatal blindness - to develop things to a critical mass, and then...Boom! We did it all ourselves. God does not have to blind us. We love our blindness. When blind greed and passion are handed out, we throng about, saying "Gimme! Gimme!" like the greediest and fattest of Children of the Damned. The work of God is to intervene with miracles that reduce our pain. He is well aware that we are more than capable at inflicting suffering upon ourselves and our fellow human beings.