I've been MIA here for a long time, and probably picked the worst possible time to stage a comeback.
You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the time we bought our daughter a praying mantis habitat and a bunch of praying mantis larvae.
The larvae hatched one day, and we poured the seething throng of mantises from the tube they came in and into their new home -- an 18-inch cube with a zipper and clear plastic sides. That night, they went totally I/P on each other. We awoke to carnage.
It was a mantis massacree. What had started as 150 newborn insects, all indistinguishable from each other, was now a landscape strewn with bug heads, bug legs, bug torsoes. They had attacked and eaten each other, as is apparently their wont. Only six of them remained alive, clinging to the sides of their habitat, their eyes wide with abject "what the fuck was that?" terror.
I don't have the stomach for this nonsense. For watching liberals eat each other.
I am not the world's leading student on the I/P conflict, but I know a circle jerk when I see one. I know a piece of stale, regurgitated rhetoric when I see one... and I see a blizzard of it here.
Whether you're "on Israel's side" or "on Palestine's side," you should question whether you're on the side of peace.
I know all the arguments about how the ball is in The Other Side's court, and how there will only be peace in the Middle East when The Other Side decides to mend its ways. I'm just saying they are wrong. I'm saying they are empty and will produce nothing but more of the same bloody results.
My fondest wish is that the militants on both sides see a vision, and lay down their arms, and commit themselves to creative reconciliation.
My second fondest wish, if I can't have my first, is that the militants on both sides get on with slaughtering each other as quickly and thoroughly as possible, rapturing each other away so that people who love peace can go about the task of making it.
That way everyone can have exactly what they want this holiday season.