Is this enough

a piece from my friend Mark Alter:

Headlines say the catastrophic earthquake near Sendai has moved Japan eight feet closer to the U.S.  Is this enough for us to understand that we are all part of one fragile world…

In January we were all Egyptians with the people protesting for democracy in the streets of Cairo; in February all with Christchurch together in the New Zealand earthquake rubble; and now we’re all Japanese, where we’ve lost tens of thousands of kin, so far.  Is this enough…

Do you remember after 9/11 “the e-mail read around the world”…  It said that suffering and poverty were the reality in Afghanistan, not the revengeful idea of “bombing people back to the stone age,” because that had already been done by the Soviets in the last war.

That email was sent by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan American writer from the Bay Area, and last night I went to hear him speak in Portland.  I also bought his book, Destiny Disrupted: A History of The World Through Islamic Eyes.

I did so because of something I’d read years ago called 80 Theses for a New Peace Camp, on the website of the Israeli peace group, Gush Shalom.  Number six of those 80 said that peace talks had failed because neither side embraced the historical narrative of the other.

Is this enough…

Do we need more…

Namaste, Mark Alter –