Some Thoughts On the Vital Need To Make Sense Out of Horror

An Israeli bombardment of Gaza seen from southern Israel on 2 Dec 2023 [Jack Guez/AFP]

Injured children are brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital for treatment after an Israeli attack on 2 Dec 2023.  [Ali Jadallah/Anadolu]

Some Thoughts On the Vital Need To

Make Sense Out of Horror

It is my belief that, as much as we can, it is deeply important to not turn away from the faces of horror, trauma, and tragedy. How else are we to act to heal and transform ourselves, our families and communities, and our nations and world if don't see what must be seen, known and understood, and absorbed at the deepest level of truth that we can bare? The valuable words of Bertrand Russell come to mind: "To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom."

And our world is deeply in need of our wisdom, our courage, our love, and our passion for peace and truth and justice.

Being human, none of us are capable of being perfectly spiritually grounded in truth and awareness and consciousness all of the time. We all have our blind spots, our triggers, our yet to be recognized and healed and transformed ancestral and cultural traumas.

Collectively this is being played out in many places. And this certainly includes the unfolding and unrelenting horrors being perpetrated by Netanyahu and the Israeli government upon Palestinians day after day after day. What I am witnessing is how the spiritual bypassing and the unaddressed and unhealed trauma of the victims of the Holocaust and their descendants has long been projected outward onto the Palestinian people. What we remain in denial of inwardly has to go somewhere.

It is therefore so incredibly obvious to me that the horrors that are generationally passed down — rather than healed and transformed — by Jewish survivors is being played out in their devastating blind spots, brutality, and the many faces of justified extreme violence that we see. How else can there be any justification for the decades long displacements, colonialism, apartheid, and the world’s largest open air prison that Israel has erected around the Palestinian people?

And of course this extreme form of the brutality of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy (bell hooks words) is creating terrorists like Hamas.

When we have internalized generations of trauma — and left those deep places in our hearts and souls untouched by truth, healing, and transformation — we remain its victims and/or perpetrators. This is certainly seen in our nation with its epidemics of depression and addictions, poverty and polarization, mass shootings and endless wars, and the insane funding of weapons of war rather than the resources of peace, prosperity, compassion, caring and love.

And right now, before our very eyes and day after day, we are witness to the horrors of the Holocaust that are being passed down as the terrorism being blindly perpetrated by Israelis — and tragically, but not surprisingly, by our American government — for decades on Palestinians. And this is what only serves to create more terrorism. The cycle of violence will continue as long as we have our own blind spots and projections, toxic policies and ideologies, dehumanization and othering, and unhealed trauma that we don’t recognize, own, or act to address and heal.

I am profoundly grief-stricken, disturbed, and outraged by the complicity of so many with the horrors that will only serve to create more terrorism. Terrorism begets terrorism. Unless we stop and do the deep, courageous, ongoing work of uncovering our blind spots, our triggers and projections, our ancestral and cultural trauma, and act to heal our hearts and souls — unless we do this deep, deep work, we humans will unknowingly continue to be complicit with horror, brutality, terrorism, and trauma.

And we will turn away, minimize, justify, or numb ourselves in the face of horror. And it is exactly this turning away — this not seeing the faces of terrorized children, bombed homes and hospitals and schools, orphaned and injured babies, starving and sick human beings, and on and on — that keeps us numb, ignorant, apathetic, complicit. We need to strengthen our hearts!

Because silence in the face of injustice is complicity with the oppressor. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." 

I have now been on a path of heart for many years. Many teachers and healers, authors and artists, truth-tellers and wisdom-keepers, and wise visionaries have supported me on this journey of emerging from generations of indoctrination, illusions, and ignorance. Their courage, love, wisdom, and fierce commitment to truth has informed and inspired me. It is my belief that we all need the support of those further up the road from ourselves to begin and continue to emerge from the deep fog of disconnection from ourselves and one another that we humans have unknowingly been in for so very long.

No two people will have the same teachers and mentors and those who support our awakening. Mine are way too extensive to name and do justice to here. But I will bow in the deepest respect and gratitude to the investigative journalists and authors who have for so many decades not turned away from horror. They have demonstrated a consistent and unwavering courage, integrity, and commitment to truth. Among those are Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Norman Solomon, Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, and many others — including many Jewish and other spiritual leaders. These are among those who bring to light the larger pictures that we humans need to know and absorb if we are to grow into our greater potential for consciousness and courage, kindness and compassion, truth and justice, wisdom and love.

May we inspire each other to not turn away from the horrors of our times. And may the piercing of our hearts move us to do whatever we possibly can to take action on behalf of a highest good for us all.

And may we, please, not lose sight of beauty, compassion, and love. Another world is possible.

Bless us all, no exceptions...

Molly

*****

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

― Arundhati Roy,

Excerpts from War Talk