Rubble

"I realized I had never understood the true meaning of 'rubble.' Such and such was "reduced to rubble" is a phrase we hear. It is different seeing what demolished buildings actually look like. Buildings in which people were living. Buildings from which hundreds of broken bodies have been removed; so thorough a job have the Palestinians done in removing the dead from squashed dwellings that no scent of death remains. What this task must have been like, both physically and psychologically, staggers the mind.

We pass police stations that were simply flattened, and all the young (most Palestinians are young) officers in them killed, hundreds of them. We pass ministries, bombed into fragments. We pass a hospital, bombed and gutted by fire. If one is not safe in a hospital, when one is already sick and afraid, where is one safe? If children are not safe playing in their schoolyards, where are they safe?" - Alice Walker, "The Best Place One Could be on Earth", July 26, 2009.

"How doofus humans are going to look -- we thought as we marched, sang, accepted our handcuffs -- still firing rockets into apartment buildings full of families, and dropping bombs on school children and their pets, when the ice melts completely in the Arctic and puts an end to our regressive, greed sourced rage forever." - Alice Walker, "The Best Place One Could be on Earth", July 26, 2009.

"Doofus" is not exactly the word I would pick, but it does express the absurdity of our violence and greed in a way that celebrates the wisdom of the earth. It reminds us of the spiritual powers that lie behind all that we see, before whom we are mites crawling on the surface of mystery. Moreover, this mystery has a personality and a love that will one day put an end to our raging greed, and there's not a damn thing we can do about that.