(This image is from the Paper of Record, The NY Times. It is of the al Aqsa Mosque atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem yesterday. I saw this vista under gray skies without overt violence).
OK. This was going to be an “Editor’s Note” to kick off the piece by Arrias on where we have drifted on the sea of global affairs. Based on reader comments over the last week featuring Mothers and a fuzzy hand puppet, it is more pleasant to think of kinder times we survived with people we cared about. There were old memories of distant seas, and real requited love, which we seem to prefer. I stumbled into this Monday unprepared for the gray reality that wrenches us apart from memories of love and caring, and the sacrifice and joy in our own lives. Instead, this morning it is back to work.
Arrias this morning had thoughts about a Mahanian issue (Albert Thayer Mahan, an old timer) and maritime power. The dimming light of a pleasant sunlit Sunday filled with recollections of love had been filled with transition. Images of trouble in Jerusalem were spreading as night came on, and in the gray light of this Monday, I realized the fighting had not been over the souk, or marketplace, but over the holy territory of the Temple Mount.
The place is venerated by two proud faiths, and reverently recalled as holy by yet a third one with which I am more familiar by the accident of upbringing.
I remembered suddenly walking those very stones three decades ago with a guy we hired to ferry us around the West Bank, slightly out of Fleet Guidelines for our port visit. It was a gray day in those precincts, and the scowling faces of the men who guarded the sacred precincts of the al Aqsa Mosque- the one built to ensure the residents of that city recognized who was now in charge of the Temple grounds.
Reading a few lines down, it appeared this outbreak of trouble was about rockets and the confiscation of homes occupied by Palestinian families. It did not include the minor issue that the houses had been previously owned by others, and seized by the Jordanian King in 1949, where the current residents have lived rent-free for seventy years. I was reminded that the rockets fired at random into the city should be treated as some sort of “protest.” As with all words, including the ones used to celebrate our Mothers and their sacrifice at our births , they are now subject to modification and politics.
Arrias talked about the nature of our national fixation in warfare since the events of 9/11. Afghanistan is roiled in trouble with our departure after two decades. So too the memories come back. Steaming in the waters south of there in 1979, forty-odd years ago, one of the bright ones among us announced one morning that the Soviets were going to do something.
If Washington knew what was to come, they were attempting not to alarm us. And a few days later, they did. It only took a decade for them to tire of the shenanigans in the mountain passes and all manner of mischief by ALCON. I remember the satisfaction in seeing the Red Army pull out. And the uneasy feeling when we went in, now two decades ago.
That leads to the underlying issues raised by Arrias. Our Global War on Terror, the one in which many of us served and all of us experienced, required those muddy boots on the ground. There is something else now, perhaps a war we cannot acknowledge as having already begun.
It includes unfamiliar terms of reference, like “The First Island Chain.” We used to steam through it unaware. Our lack of preparedness may have consequences, just as the cyber-attacks on our aging infrastructure and pipelines may foretell.
Like you, I prefer the feeling of yesterday to that of today. Of the memory of Good in this world. Socotra House LLC has resolved to remember that good and the notion of “kindness” in this world. But baseball great Yogi Berra summed it up with one of his better and incongruous screwball observations:
“Nobody can be all smiley all the time, but having a good, positive attitude isn’t something to shrug off.”
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com