The Situation that is now upon us does not recognize national borders, nor ethnic or religious divides. It is universal, it is basic, and it is absolute.

It seems that almost everything I write recently drifts into the area of gaps, of divides, disconnects, and which have a measure of bridgeableness and which do not, of wagons circling and doors closing, and others opening.

There is something in the nature of some of us, I think, that naturally rebels at the suggestion that a gap is unbridgeable, a divide so deep that no compromise, no negotiation is possible. And so we hammer away, ignoring smashed fingers, because that something in us does not want to “give up.”

There is such a fine line between giving up and recognizing that our energies are sorely needed somewhere else that many of us often miss it. In our zeal to bridge that gap, we often lose sight of the one thing any compromise or negotiation needs most: a recognition and comprehension of the other party’s point of view.

Even as we cajole and wheedle and try to choose the best words to make them see ours, the temptation to wishfully craft theirs into what we long for it to be is sometimes just too strong.

Extricating ourselves from such a predicament can be a painful process, as it challenges our stubbornness, and forces us to acknowledge things that we wish were not so.

But as painful as it may be to confront and accept the fact that someone else’s point of view is indeed one that our own moral absolutes will simply not allow us to meet halfway, that there are some drawing rooms into which we should not enter, and in which, if we have entered, we should not remain.

People in gated communities put those gates there for a reason, and rather than crashing those gates, even if our gesture is tolerated for whatever reason, our efforts will be better spent in working toward our goals outside of that “closed space,” and if we are also obliged by circumstances to circle our wagons, we can make the circle a large one.

The Situation that is now upon us does not recognize national borders, nor ethnic or religious divides. It is universal, it is basic, and it is absolute.

How ironic that the words of a man disliked by so many both in and outside of so many spaces so aptly and so tragically correctly define the plight of us all: “You are with us (US policies) or you are with the terrorists.”

It is this sorry rag of truth that we all share. We are on either one side or another. We are either for invasion, occupation, kidnapping, torture, etc etc etc, or we are against it.

It does not matter whether one side calls the other “terrorists,” or “extremists,” or “radicals,” “obstructionists,” “rejectionist,” “anti-business,” and calls itself “patriotic,” “pragmatic,” “centrist,” electable.”

It does not matter whether the other side calls its opponents “the real terrorists,” “nationalist,” “racist,” “colonialist,” “imperialist,” “exceptionalist,” and calls itself “the real patriots” or “pro-peacce,” or whatever term each side wishes to apply to the other, whatever term each wishes to apply to itself.

Just as the Situation knows no national borders, neither does it bow to nomenclature. It is a divide that cannot be bridged by euphemisms or presentation strategies or even the current favorite “nuances.”

The only path to a solution, if there is one, begins with acceptance of these painful truths, with meeting the reality of the Situation head-on, despite our very natural fear, and very natural desire to take refuge in the comfort of semantics and platitudes.

Two recent comments on my blog, as well as an article pointed out to me by catnip brought this home to me with a terrible and inescapable starkness.

One, from a tireless peace activist, stunned by the fact that she is now at risk, not from some shadowy foreign “terst” entity, but from her own countrymen. The Situation, remember, is knows no national borders. It is the Ultimate and Extreme non-national space.

The other, from a very courageous man who has not only the bravery and nobility of soul to make a journey so agonizing, so difficult, that those of us who have not had to make it can only imagine the wrenching pain of the process, but a man who also has the grace and pure-hearted generosity to have shared every step of his passage with earth residents, that we might all be edified, inspired, and educated by his heroism. He pointed out a hard and universal truth: Aggressors put their fate in the hands of their victims.

These two, both Americans, might take some small measure of comfort to know that they are not alone, that while the Situation knows no borders, at least
one of their countrymen has moved his wagon next to theirs, and I suspect we may be hearing from more.

As events unfold (are you as tired of reading that phrase as I am of typing it?), we will all go through some painful and unpleasant experiences, offline, we will watch helplessly as families divide, as office water coolers ring with angry words, we will be witness to all the various ways in which human beings make manifest the grim and unbending horror of the Situation.

Online, the “kerfluffles” and textual hysterics we may have seen are nothing to what we will see. We will receive emails verging on, even descending into, “hate mail” from internet friends we have for years called “brother.” With eyes still wet from those inbox tears, the online phenomena we see will, like its offline homologue, involve irrevocable dissolution of longstanding friendships, as individuals come to grips with the totality, the vastness, the all-encompassing and unbridegable gap of the Situation.

We will variously bid farewell to innocence, or “put away childish things,” as the Christian bible says, and with that unglorious weight of sadness and fear in our hearts, reluctantly move our wagons into one circle or another, and forsake the relatively irrelevant and picayune battles that have of necessity and by definition failed to stave off the inevitable, and prepare ourselves for the War without Borders into which we are all, every one of us, without exceptions, thrust into by the universality of the Situation.