Sherry Chandler

From Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, a guest commentary by Todd Hasak-Lowy, On the Occasion of Uri Grossman’s Death

And so the news comes yesterday that one of [David] Grossman’s sons, Uri, was killed in Lebanon, just two days after Grossman, along with the Israeli writers Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, held a press conference urging the Prime Minister to reach a cease-fire agreement rather than expand Israeli military operations in Lebanon. In a long conflict with too many ironic, poignant, and purely tragic stories, this is the first one I can’t get past. Few if any in this conflict deserve what they’ve gotten, but how is one to come to terms with a father burying his son, when this father has so courageously articulated the price of this conflict, who has done so in a manner far exceeding simple progressive liberal clichés, who has turned this pursuit into a sort of devastating poetry, who has managed to remind us again and again the need to be human in this conflict that obliterates both humanity and human beings?

With everything ongoing—the weary diplomacy conducted in the absence of any trust, the inevitable talk over possible early elections in Israel, the dizzyingly complicated analysis of who gained and who lost and where things stand now, the bitter accusations of who is to blame and who must be called to account, and, finally, the isolated and not so isolated lethal shots that will be fired from both directions despite the cease fire—it will be at once tempting and convenient to merely open tomorrow’s newspaper to survey the latest bewildering developments of this nearly hundred year-old conflict. But maybe now’s the time to stop, to really stop and think about how each death on every side draws a ring around itself to include another dozen or so people, family members and life-long friends, who never fully recover from their mourning. Maybe now’s the time to realize, if you’re willing to do the horribly simple math, that for some time now every Palestinian and every Israeli has likely found him or herself, and in many cases more than once, drawn reluctantly into someone’s now obliterated circle, leaving a conflict between two nations of mourners. I don’t know what exactly thinking and feeling these things will accomplish, perhaps such an exercise is just another instance of futile idealism. All I know is yesterday the person who least needed to have that ring drawn around him to know and feel what it must be like to live in desolate space of someone’s permanent absence now finds himself on the inside, his wondrously humane empathy suddenly beside the point. ‘

Read Shamash Says on this subject too:

This is my Lebanese friend Anila who lives in Beirut.

I’ve studied with Anila for the past three summers during graduate studies in the U.K. She created this image as part of a class project just before her departure two weeks ago. She was to graduate with our masters class, but she had to leave early because her neighborhood was bombed, and all her family evacuated to another town in Lebanon.

Kind, loving, and compassionate, she is a courageous woman. We all cried as we said our good-byes before she left for Cyprus, one of the few countries who will accept those with Lebanese passports.

…

When I look at Anila, I don’t see a different country, race, religion, or idealogy.

I see dear sister, who has been such a sweet part of all of our lives: one who has shown such kindness to us all.

And on the news, all I see are dead bodies everywhere, dead bodies in her neighborhood, and I wonder: will we ever WAKE UP?????

WHEN WILL WE STOP KILLING EACH OTHER?

A line from a book I’m reading called Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami comes to mind: “In a hundred years everybody here- me included- will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust.” (p. 59)

Life is transient; our time here on earth is so brief.

Why must we drop the bombs and blow up whole cities, whole countries???

Chaplin’s tramp…is a dreamer and an honest seeker of happiness, not an anarchist threat to the social order. Chaplin’s vagabond slacker is an image, in fact, of a better way to live. He skewers bourgeois pretension, and part of the fun is always to see how the Tramp manages to live the good life with no means. The romantic freedom that the Little Tramp represents may be no closer to any person’s actual reality than is the threat of criminality run rampant [in the public perception of the tramp], but it serves as a reminder that the agreed-upon goods and values of society always threaten to ensnare and foil happiness as much as they enable its pursuit.

— Tom Lutz, from Doing Nothing (FSG, 2006), p. 167

I guess the Little Tramp wasn’t too worried about retirement (or “what’s going to become of me in old age?”) or health insurance for his children. I guess that’s the appeal, after all, but I must confess that as a child I found Chaplin films more sad than funny. (The Marx Brothers, by contrast, were too mean.) It was only as I got older that I began to see the Bugs Bunny flavor of the things.