Op-Ed

The easiest way to cope with the news is to shrivel it into an us-vs.-them abstraction and, thus, to extract as much humanity from it as possible.

I’m thinking about the recent protest death of Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire — doused himself in flammable liquid, lit a match and ignited himself — in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. this past Sunday, Feb. 24. The last words he shouted were “Free Palestine!”

No, this is not the first such death. Over the centuries — and particularly in recent decades, since the Vietnam war — a number of people, spiritually distraught over war or other social conditions, have killed themselves in protest by self-immolation . . . that is, in the most painful way imaginable. You might say they entered hell of their own accord. Why? The question tears at the soul.

Excuse me as I ponder eternity — briefly.

Like it or not, this is the essence of . . . uh, aging. As I wrote a year ago: “. . . once you actually hit it — that three letter word, ‘old’ — watch out: ‘An aged man (as Wiiliam Butler Yeats pointed out, as he sailed poetically to Byzantium) is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick . . .’”

Nonetheless, hooray for my good fortune! I’ve been dancing around at age 77 for a while now, and before I start complaining about the aches and pains that come with it, I have to acknowledge — indeed, revere — the mere fact of making it this far. So many people don’t, due to the random will of fate, but also due to the hell of war, which remains humanity’s cancerous addiction. How can I complain when the bombs I help pay for are killing children?

"If you try to break the mold, you’re not going to last long," famed linguist and cultural critic Noam Chomsky wrote in an essay published in Z Magazine in October 1997. 

 The essay, entitled, 'What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream", appeared before social media took off to the point it became essential to the formation of our modern culture. 

 Facebook arrived in 2004. A year later, YouTube was launched, followed by Twitter, now X. 

 With time, what may have started as creative or even juvenile digital phenomena became defining elements in our perception of ourselves, each other and the world at large. 

 Before the exponential growth of social media, the internet had numerous, but understandable, challenges pertaining to access, rules and regulations, financial viability, copyrights, social inequality and the like. 

“Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital . . .”

No, this is not the official “you are now entering Dearborn, Michigan” sign, at the corner of Michigan and Wyoming avenues, or whatever. This prosperous Detroit suburb — not only the hometown of Henry Ford but my hometown as well, the place where I grew up —which has one of the largest Arab-American populations in North America, was recently the target of a snarky, racist op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal. The above words were its title.

Read the news, hup, two, three, four!

“Top United States officials prodded Israel on Monday to do more to protect civilians in the Gaza Strip . . .”

Thus began a recent, and oh so typical, piece of war reportage. It was purveyed by the New York Times but it’s something you find in almost any mainstream source. The essence of the news is that the U.S. will continue to support Israel’s right to “defend itself” by bombing the crap out of Gaza and will keep feeding it the military equipment necessary to do so, but it sternly urges Israel to try not to kill too many babies or other civilians. Get it? War must be — and is, when we wage it — a moral undertaking.

Most members of the legislature should be well acquainted with the HB 6 fiasco that ultimately led to a 20-year prison sentence for former Speaker of the Ohio House Larry Householder. At the center of the scandal was the supposed need for a $1 billion, publicly-funded bailout for two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse outside of Toledo and Perry, northeast of Cleveland. To further the scam, FirstEnergy, the owner of the reactors at the time, placed them in bankruptcy in March 2018. 

In six short years, however, the two nuclear reactors have gone from being bankrupt and needing a billion-dollar bailout to Perry operating so well its current owner, Energy Harbor (EH), has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to extend its operating license for another 20 years. But as can be seen in the linked article, neither the NRC nor EH care to address pesky questions from the public such as is the energy from the Perry nuclear plant even needed in the first place? 

Will  new president  Ted “Top Gun” Carter finally announce that the senior administration moved across the street from the campus itself in July, and place a sign on 15 E. 15th Ave., other than Smashburger’s and Chicken Tenders?  And on Bricker Hall, now unannounced home to the Department of Economics?

His opening remarks to the Columbus Dispatch (Jan. 12, 2024): “I believe I’m where I’m supposed to be.” “Carter said he now gets to the chief spokesperson for Ohio State and what it stands for…. ‘I’m looking forward to making sure [Ohio elected officials]  know that we’re going to be doing the right things for the right reasons here at Ohio State.’”

Will OSU finally turn off the indoor lights overnight at 15 E. 15th Ave., and reduce its use of fossil fuels across campus, despite years of promises? And finish the first floor of University Square South which is now unsuitable for human use including for Buckeyes’ scrimmages?

I inhale the big, do-nothing shrug that always follows the annual posting, by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, of its global metaphor for Armageddon.

For the second year in a row, the Doomsday Clock has been set – by scientists analyzing the dangers faced by Planet Earth due to human exploitation and nuclear-armed geopolitics – at 90 seconds to midnight. In other words, be afraid. Be very afraid.

“I am begging the world: stop all the wars, stop killing people, stop killing babies. War is not the answer. . . .War is not how you fix things. This country, Israel, is going through horror. And I know the mothers in Gaza are going through horror. . . .”

I can only kneel in awe.

Yes, there is sanity in the world – moral sanity – even, and especially, now, as revenge rages in Israel, fed by American armaments. There are courageous voices calling not simply for “peace,” essentially understood by much of the world as nothing more than a ceasefire, but for, oh my God, compassion, healing, love. The “enemy” is as human as we are! And waging war against the enemy guarantees nothing but . . . endless war.