Salvaging the Wreck

Laurie King-Irani offers these hopeful words.

We are now living in a wreck--all of us, from Washington, DC, to the refugee camps of Beirut and Gaza, to the bombed out villages of Afghanistan, to the windswept coasts of California, to the suburbs of Tel Aviv. In the last few years, the world has come to represent a submerged disaster, floating aimlessly beneath the waves of history, economy, and politics, devoid of leadership, vision, justice, or compassion. Our world, this wreck, is a huge, complex, and injured, yet precious thing, its parts deteriorating, but still interconnected in ways we do not know unless we investigate, diving deeper, directing our flashlights into the hull...

What one salvages from long visits to the wreck, from looking at it with courage and honesty, as my wise women friends in Beirut have done, is a deep awareness that there is no "us" and "them." Underwater, there are no borders or fences. All flows together: hope, horror, memory, dreams, fear and wonder. We are in the wreck together; we are in danger of drowning in the same sea, in need of the same oxygen of justice, sense, decency, compassion, and dignity, and threatened by the same dangers: fundamentalist ideologies of all sorts--nationalist and religious alike; the insidious belief that some lives are cheap, others are worthy; and the delusion that military might and coercive force will deliver us from the disaster that is--sadly--already in progress.