Can You Play Me a Memory?

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Its nine o’clock on a Saturday

The regular crowd shuffles in,

There’s an old man sitting next to me,

Staring into his tonic and gin.  

He says, son, can you play me a memory?

I’m not really sure how it goes,

But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete,

When I wore a younger man’s clothes.

A memory . . .

He remembered that one.  It was sad, it was sweet, and he knew it complete, when he wore a younger man’s clothes . . .

He was a veteran of the 6-Day War, a veteran of the Yom Kippur War, a veteran of the invasion of Lebanon.  He was a son of Holocaust victims, an old man tired of the killing, the hate, the self-righteousness of victims who create other victims and call it justice.  

President Carter believes We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land . . .

It was not a Palestinian who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin because he was promoting peace with the Palestinians; it was an extremist right wing Israeli. And Sadat was assassinated by members of a fundamentalist Islamic terrorist cell in the Egyptian military.

Extremists in the Muslim world want to destroy Israel.  Extremists in Israel think there’s a military solution to Muslim extremism.  So the killing goes on and on and on.  And the innocent suffer . . .

The innocent in Palestine suffer.  The innocent in Israel suffer.  Innocence itself suffers.  Cynicism takes hold and breeds more cynicism, killing incites more killing, and the vicious cycle just repeats itself.  

You have to plant seeds of peace, and nurture them.  With Ambassador George Mitchell getting involved, I believe it could be, something good has begun . . .

Mitchell said that along with Obama and Clinton, he believed a goal of a Jewish state and a Palestinian state living side by side was possible and the conflict, even if centuries old, could end-a lesson, he said, he learned during his negotiations in Northern Ireland.  “From my experience there, I formed the conviction that there is no such thing as a conflict that can’t be ended,” Mitchell said. “Conflicts are created, conducted and sustained by human beings. They can be ended by human beings.”