Remembering Michelle

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE KID, ten or eleven in the mid nineteen sixties, I would have sworn that by the time I got to the age I am now, that there would be no war in the world, and that all humanity's (which I then called "mankind") essential problems,war,hunger, disease, etc., would have been solved and eradicated, with technology. Wow, was I ever wrong. I can recall fervently believing in science and technological advancement by humans. I loved science fiction, and dreamed not of a dystopian future, but a utopian one, not only for my posterity but for myself as well. I still do. I'll just have to take what I get, I suppose. About twenty five years ago, at the "dawn" of the personal computer age, I met a girl online, in an AOL chatroom. Only those of a certain age will remember the golden halcyon days of AOL chatrooms...We "fell in love", insofar as one can actually do that on a computer, which I assume is still debatable, although most people probably have and thus believe you can. She was about seventeen years younger than I, and lived in one of those big industrial towns in New Jersey. She was Jewish, and had been born in Israel, and spent the first eight years of her life there, before her family moved to the U.S.. Regarding the Palestinian-Israeli "question", she was hard core. She called the Palestinians "animals". I recall her complaining that Israel is this tiny little country with hardly any land, and they want to take what little we have away from us. I recall being able to understand her point of view (I still can), but not sharing it, indeed, disagreeing with it, which I still do. Fascinating, to think that at the time she was a single twenty eight year old mom with three small kids, and that when she and I went our separate cyber ways, she was thinking of remarrying. By now she must be in her early fifties, her children in their late twenties. I hope they are all doing well. Equally relevant as the small size of Israel, it seems to me, is the fact that it, in its entirety, rests upon land which, until seventy five years ago, belonged to another country, that Israel was carved out of land taken from Palestine. That fact, more than anything else, would seem to be the crux of the problem, a problem which has not fundamentally changed in seventy five years. Its almost as if the inception, creation, establishment of Israel was poorly planned and executed, despite decades of arguing and planning. Its almost as if it would be better now had Great Britain,the U.S., and their allies had done nothing to change Palestineinto Israel, but instead hadbeen content to leave wellenough alone. Since the eighteen seventies or so the "meme" of "Zionism" had attracted a steady stream of Jews to Palestine, the prommised land of the Bible. And there they stayed and lived, Jews among Muslims, relatively peacefully. Certainly much more peacefully than since the partition of Palestine. This business you hear all the time about some imaginary ancient hatred between Muslim and jew,Arab and Jew, is pure myth. The hatred we see today between them is tracable directly to 1948 and the great imperialistic experiment of the western powers. Western imperialism is the root cause of many of the world's currrent miseries, including poverty in Africa, India, and Latin America, to name but a few. WE haven't learned our lesson, here in the United States. We're still at it, still being a disaster unto the world.