Clean Hands

[puebloknot]

My closest friend, Julie, was born in Tel Aviv in 1940, and remembers celebrating Israel's statehood with her mother and father when she was eight. Family members not present at that event were her father's eight brothers and sisters, mother, and father, who all died at Auschwitz. Also not in attendance were her mother's whole family, who, likewise, perished in concentration camps. She never knew what it was to have a grandmother or a grandfather. Her mother's mother was the "wise woman" in her little town in Poland, the equivalent of the town's resident psychotherapist, with no official credentials, but a lifetime of experience to share with people who came to her with their problems.

Julie now lives in Los Angeles, and is a therapist, working with children and their dysfunctional families. I think her chosen profession is no coincidence.

We met years ago when we were both single mothers, trying to pay the bills by selling medical insurance. Neither of us wanted to do that, but it gave us some flexibility to be with our children, and it was better than scrubbing toilets -- some days, anyway.

In the years that I've known Julie, we have spent a lot of time talking about World War II, the Holocaust, and the birth of the State of Israel. I have spent many hours around her dining table as the only "shiksa" in the crowd, listening to her Israeli friends talking about their past and their future, their concern for Israel, their guilt at being safe in America when they fear the worst for the land of their birth.

I've come to admire these friends for their toughness, their spirit, their carrying on their lives with the existential split that haunts most of them with regard to the ongoing violence that has plagued their home since the moment of its birth. I have listened as they express concern for Israel while at the same time wanting a fair resolution to the "Palestinian" problem. One man, David, born an Iraqi Jew, who fled Iraq at age eight with his parents for the safety of Israel, said it succinctly: "Until *everyone* has a home, there will be no peace. Everyone needs and wants the same thing." They share some of the same perplexities that we in America do: Their government does not necessarily listen to the will of the people.

In one of our conversations about Julie's memories of her life in Israel, she recalled the publicity that attended the necessity to designate a building to be used as a jail because Israel had its first official criminal. And she expressed her feelings and that of her friends regarding Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, saying with great sadness that Israelis could no longer feel pride that Israel had "clean hands."

Over the last six years, I have thought of that conversation and how it reflects so clearly how I now feel about my own country. Our own loss of clean hands, in my own consciousness, began with Vietnam, was back lit by the Civil Rights Movement, extended through the questionable election of Ronald Reagan, and continued until it reached its apex in the selection by a rogue Supreme Court of George W. Bush, the orchestrator in principle, if not in fact, of the war that now rages in the Middle East. That old cliche about the frog in the pot seems terribly apt at this point in our history. We have been enjoying the warmth of the hot tub, but suddenly things are heating up, and we have reason to feel very uncomfortable, very threatened. And though we may have been fooling ourselves for a long time about our moral superiority, our beacon of light to the rest of the world, George W. Bush has finally left no doubt in the opinion of the world that America no longer has *clean hands.*

The illegal attack by the United States on Iraq, a country that had not threatened us or attacked us, is the penultimate example of our loss of our national soul -- our clean hands. So egregious are the crimes of George W. Bush, et al. that if we are to survive as a nation of laws, a justifiably proud leader in the world, we *must* hold them all accountable for their crimes against our state, their crimes against humanity.

This is not a day for discussion of which protocol best serves to bring honor back to our country. It *is* a day to consider the price paid by generations of people to secure our liberty and make our lives blessed beyond measure. And it is a day to rest, renew ourselves, and prepare for the task ahead to make right the greatest wrongs in the history of our country.

A verse from the poetry of the Psalms is with me tonight: "...weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."

We the People must claim that right to returning joy for our country, and we must not rest until we have clean hands once again, and can offer that joy to the world.

L'Chaim, To Life!

[orpupilofnature57]

1. Kick ,Happy Thanksgiving!

[brer cat]

2. Excellent post! Thank you.

[Crim_n al]

3. Look into the way the Indians were treated by white settlers.

Look at the terrible cruelties of slavery and the slave trade.

Spend some time googling the war against the Philippines.

Clean hands are an ideal worth working towards. I doubt any country ever has begun with them.

Certainly not Israel, America, or my own country, Australia.

[puebloknot]

5. Origin of our countries

You make an excellent point. I have Native American bloodlines on both sides of my family, but I was 50 before I really understood the American Holocaust.

My point in my post was basically that my friend had grown up with a deep concern for Israel, because of her background. We Americans are not taught the true history of our country when we are in school. Nevertheless, you must have seen the many posts here expressing love for the country, in spite of waking up to the fact that we are not, and never were, the shining light for the rest of the world that we've been conditioned to think we are.

My "clean hands" analogy was more a matter of a relative state, rather than an abolute one. Our hands were cleaner in World War II than they are with what has transpired over the last six years, and well before that. We, as a country, have been shocked into having to take a hard look at what we are, and what we have allowed to happen by doing what the Germans did -- going on with life without realizing a tidal wave that was wending its way toward us.

Thanks for weighing in!

[understandinglife]

4. "...weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." ... Another brilliant OP.

Thank you for sharing this with all of us, today, Thanksgiving Day.

"We the People ..." will be washing our Republic's hands for decades given all the criminal grim that Bush and his neoconster buddies have intentionally ground into the tissue of America.

On 7 November 2006 we began scrubbing and for that, today, we will be thankful and share a bit of joy that the process has commenced.

Recommended.

Peace,
Bob


BE AMERICA. ---