A two-faced New Year

Last week we were filling the quiet, holy night with songs of rejoicing at the birthday of the Prince of Peace. Just at the turn of New Year, gruesome, hateful war brought its grisly images of dying and wounded men, women and children, the usual casualties. Only one Israeli soldier was thus far killed in the attack in Gaza. Loud and strident were the voices of the politicians who vowed to create new cemeteries for their foes, and the other side promising to wage war to its fullest.

These noises are recurrent, and have been interrupted as often as saner heads prevail. But the Middle East seems to breed violence, dating back to pre-biblical times. Using the same tired rhetoric, the one faction has come up within the same charges and counter-charges, all the while killing off the other party in memorable massacres.

"Honest brokers" have tried with doubtful success to solve the questions that produces the mayhem, all being lost in a babble of charges and denials. And that bad news only involves one war over there. It almost reads like a football play-off season: "Pakistan vs India" -- "Taliban vs America" -- "Iraq vs Iraq (suicidal bombers)" "Iran vs everyone over there."

Small wonder they named January for the two-headed god who looked both ways -- in quieter times, we could and did comment on the wisdom of looking back to where we have been in order to make orderly advances to where it is we hope to go. In that respect, we can make a mental review of the year just joining its predecessors in the halls of history. 2008, like 1968 before it, was a banner twelvemonth full of events which have been historic to the nth degree. We toiled through the ups and downs of a prolonged campaign started by a double-digit pack, both Republican and Democrat, with some Independents to boot. What a set of personalities and what a contest which boiled down to our electing an African-American president as well!

Humankind will have to learn how to stop the killing if we are to save our planet. We must try to live out an entire generation of folks concerned with the ultimate survival of us all if we can put an end to the scandalous mode of murder which has become grist for the media mill. This must start with the individuals, then family, community, state and nation until we become a people devoted to peace in all of our thinking. If we do, and promote the concept of personal honor, we will have re-earned our mantle of goodness. Prosperity cannot be too far behind.