Sunday morning greeted a beautiful land today.
The people who live in this beautiful land greeted the morning with fear, anger, and rocket fire, as their children woke to find their world falling apart.
Today it is the children of Israel and Gaza who suffer because their parents and grandparents have not learned to live in peace. War is the way of their world, and they are learning its price at a time when they should be learning about the beauty of a rose, the feel of the grass under their feet, and the magic of play.
The children will pay a high price for this madness. Some will die, some will be orphaned, some will lose their homes, and others will forget how to be children once their hearts and minds are touched by the sheer ugliness of it all. Innocence lost never to be found again.
Tonight in our country we should take notice of where greed, hatred, and intolerance can take us as we lie snug in our beds in the land of freedom.
But tomorrow we will wake up to a land that has forgotten how to treasure that freedom. We will wake up to a country with a legislative body more interested in making sure our president doesn’t get anything he wants, than passing laws that will protect the rights and interests of its citizens. We will wake up to the rumblings of citizens whose anger over their party losing an election has defeated their reason.
As we build up armies and navies and bombs and missiles to protect us from unseen enemies, who will protect us from ourselves? Who will protect our children from ourselves?
I dream of nobility and the love of freedom coming back into the hearts of our people. Of tolerance replacing intolerance, of open mindedness replacing prejudice, and of love replacing hatred. For if there is no self correction, no change of course, our freedom is in peril and the soldiers of many generations will have died in vain.
Today it is Israel and Gaza. Let us pray that tomorrow it is not us. Let us make sure that tomorrow it is not us. So the children don’t suffer.
I remember vividly what it is like to wake up to a bed full of shattered glass from a bomb blast when I was a child.
Author Adrianne Miller's Blog 
Brilliant, thank you very much Adrianne for these wise words.
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Thank you, Martin! I know our hearts beat as one on this subject!
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No child anywhere should ever have the horrible memory of violence imposed upon his/her innocent mind.
It’s incomprehensible to me how adults can forget their own childhood and inflict such pain on their children.
What will it take for us to finally learn the lessons of our violent history?
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That is the question, Yoli, that I ask myself. Perhaps they forgot to be children too early in their lives I look at our own community of Cubans in exile and wonder if the opportunity to return ever came, would we have the grace to forgive, to embrace a new generation with love instead of fear and violence? Or would we go there to punish those who hurt us, the parents and grandparents of the children who are now growing up there? I think that there are many people who can hear the message of peace, who see the opportunity for a world at peace and are willing to work for that world to manifest. Thank you so much for your visit and your always thought provoking posts.
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I share your dream
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