Saturday.

It’s supposed to be a quiet day.

I will meet two friends/students of mine.

On the way to a restaurant to have lunch a Belgian friend in Rwanda writes me about how Palestinian fighters are on the loose in the streets of Tel Aviv.

Am surprised, because when I check the news it seems Hamas has prepared this offensive very well. Sorry, but I always think Hamas are ineffective amateurs. Not this time, clearly. For the first time in my life time I will see headlines about this conflict where the death toll on the Israeli side is higher than on the Palestinian side.

For now at least. We all know that in the coming days Israel is going to flatten Gaza.

I see people comment online that they suspect Israel let this happen so they would have the perfect reason to retaliate with brute force.

One of my friends, someone from Austria, moved to Israel less than a week ago.

I know he is in a city Palestinian rockets cannot reach, but if Hezbollah gets involved his situation becomes a little more precarious.

More people start writing me. Some are staunch supporters of Israel and get rather emotional.

Personally I condemn all forms of violence, but the Palestinian people has the right to resist. I also refuse to see them as terrorists. They are freedom fighters. And if they are kidnapping Israeli citizens… Well, that’s awful, but the IDF does that every day. Except they don’t use the word ‘kidnap’ in such cases, they use the words ‘detain’ or ‘arrest’.

On the tactical level I am surprised that Hamas can be so succesful.

On the strategic level I think it’s akin to suicide and it shows how desperate Palestinians have become.

On a moral level… that’s the hardest level to assess. The Ukrainians are celebrated when they shoot their Russian invaders. The Palestinians are usually condemned. Maybe because it does not have a conventional army and has to resort to desperate tactics to combat their Israeli foes.

This isn’t the only war raging.

The country next door has been at war for years. There are 200,000 Ukrainian refugees in Slovakia as a result.

My friend in Rwanda is writing from a country that saw a gigantic genocide when I was still a child.

Azerbajdzan is killing people in a region I – sorry – forgot the name of. Hey, you can’t keep track of every violent conflict. There are just too many. Was it Karabach??

I have a book in my bag that whose content is related to the Yugoslav wars. There are pictures of bullet riddled buildings inside. I want to lend it to one of the men I will meet today. He was in Belgrade last week.

In the evening I go and see Oppenheimer in the cinema. More war.

And then there is the war in my head. Of course.

Often reading about real wars is just a distraction from the one raging in my head.

I have more solutions for all the above mentioned military conflicts than the eternal one that tears my psyche to shreds.

When friends, especially when they aren’t even trying to stay a little objective, I notice am just exhausted from all of it.

Questions and worries swirl around in my head.

Am I a good father?

Where to find a tiny bit of happiness?

How to somehow appease this ever raging libido of me that keeps sniping at me at the most annoying times?

The kind of shit you don’t share with others.

Painful situations from the past creeping up. Some twenty years old.

With demons hammering away, I have to find empathy and reason to form opinions about the problems in our world. At least I feel morally obliged to do so. Maybe only because I was raised in a family where we cared about what was going on in the world. Some families are blissfully oblivious.

Was it right to create the atomic bomb?

Was there any justification in dropping two of those on Nippon (Japan)?

That’s a question that’s been bothering me from at least the age of ten.

I still have no answers, but am leaning more towards no than when I was younger.

Having a child has changed my views on many things. The wanton destruction of human life hits me way harder than it did before.

And as you can see my mind is just a jumble of unproductive questions with few answers.

Unproductive. The greatest sin of our time.

To be productive and to ‘realize one’s full potential’ is THE imperative mantra these days, so on top of everything I even feel shame and guilt for filling my head with things that are not productive (= do not lead to monetary gain).

When I arrived home yesterday at 1.30 am I had this thought:

I can imagine scenarios in which the world would be more than fine, scenarios in which I would be happy and more able to be myself, more alive.

But those scenarios are not real.

So it’s back to merely learning how to dance in the fucking rain.

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