HP wrote asking BW: Are you suggesting the suicide bombers are a war against Sharon? These are people whose open intent is to sweep Israel into the sea. People to whom the Arabs have never given a homeland because Israel is where they will be when the Jews are all killed. We are in error to personalize things. Sharon isn't the problem, no matter the convenience it provides newsmen and politicians to emphasize individuals.
Harry, I will not challenge your statement at length, that we are in error to personalize things, but it sounds very much like history being understood by science: here is a solid mass that will not budge and over here is a single entity that has no affect on it and cannot possibly make the solid mass move, dissolve or change in any way. This comes back to the old question of do men as individuals affect history, or is history such a solid mass that individuals are pulled along by it but never able to drive history a certain way? Of course, we all agree that individuals matter in their local, regional and now global histories. Sharon is certainly part of the problem. He gives the wall or solid mass of desperate Islamic hate a target on the world event stage, just as Arafat is a target for the global defenders of Israel. Identifying the I - P problem as an unmovable, impenetrable object (open intent to sweep Israel out to the sea) only contributes to the problem, it makes it seem impossible to change, just as Tom Walker wrote re: Emery Roe's Analytical Tip opinion that environmentalists and economists can make doing anything about global warming or global poverty seem too large a problem to deal with by individuals or individual states. When we condense historical events down to a formula to understand it, we often miss the mythos that is involved. Your statement is practical, using logos, and reflects (what I think is) your intellectual training/preference, but both mythos and logos are involved in life and the unfolding drama of mankind. If the right CEO can make or break a corporation, if one professor and not another can attract more students to a department, if a single talented researcher can make the difference in a breakthrough in medical science, if one lawyer can make a jury see the evidence in a different way, then why should we not blame Sharon and Arafat for contributing to this political problem? I see the I - P issue as a crumbling brick wall, not a solid one, and I am focused on the crack in my line of sight that I can do something about. - Karen
