There are, as I am writing this, 114 armed conflicts underway across the globe.
Forty-five of them are in the Middle East and North Africa. Thirty-five are happening in sub-Saharan Africa. Twenty-one are being fought in Asia, seven are in Europe and the remaining six are in Latin America.
At this moment, people are at war, rebelling, exacting revenge, violently making a point, or uprising against their oppressors in Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, Western Sahara, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Afghanistan, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, and The Philippines.
The six Latin American skirmishes are split evenly, three and three, between Mexico and Colombia. In the European theatre, Russia is occupying or trying to occupy Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. There are also a few additional splinter fights between various factions happening in and around the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Armenia is occupying part of Azerbaijan.
These conflicts are all being monitored by the Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, or the Geneva Academy for short. Some are relatively new, and some have been going on for decades. Some of them make the news and some we ignore.
Last year, over 238,000 people lost their lives during these wars.
Reading down that list of countries, I have personally been to nine of them: Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, Burkina Faso, Mali, India, Mexico, Colombia, and Russia. On a flight to South Africa a million years ago, we stopped in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to refuel. It was the dead of the night, and we landed in the middle of a locust swarm. Even though we had to go into the terminal, such as it was, I don’t think that counts.
I have an appointment tomorrow to get my teeth whitened.
One of my teeth needed a crown because the old silver filling had done to it whatever it is that old silver filings eventually do. The tooth was shot. There’s always a wave of glee that comes over my dentist when one of my teeth finally reaches the point of no return and something finally must be done. They’re never happier.
A month ago, the old crown came out and they gave me a temporary crown while the real one was being made. A few days ago, I went in, and in very short order, they took out the stand-in cap and popped in the real one, cemented it and I was good to go.
After it was in and we were looking at the results in a little hand-held mirror, the subject of tooth whitening came up. The new crown is every so slightly whiter than the teeth surrounding it. To be honest, now that the crown is in, I’m not even certain which tooth it is anymore.
Be that as it may, I thought about it. Twenty years ago, I whitened my teeth using the plastic trays and I had been considering doing it again. So many of my friends are actors whose teeth are picture-perfect bright that it’s hard not to think about having it done when I’m with them. While I carried my old plastic trays with me through quite a few moves, somewhere along the line they got lost.
It seemed utterly frivolous, but why not? Instead of getting new ones this time, I’ve decided to pay the extra money and just do the one-shot in-office visit.
Many of my friends and neighbors are Jewish and, so, have a direct connection to the war between the Israelis and the Palestinians. I feel my friends’ anguish and terror, and it’s heartbreaking. I, however, feel one step removed from it. Don’t get me wrong, I am truly horrified by what’s happening there, but I am equally horrified by what is happening in some of the other places on our planet.
For example, as a homosexual man, were I in Afghanistan or Mali or any of the other places now controlled by the Taliban, I could be killed simply for existing. Convicted anywhere that operates under Sharia Law, I could either be stoned to death, or they could build a wall and push it over on top of me. I’ve seen videos of gay men in Iraq, tied to chairs, set on fire, and thrown from the tops of tall buildings. Those images keep me up at night and are forever seared into my brain.
Listening to American Christian Fundamentalists spew their hate, my fear is that persecution on that level against my community could start to happen here as well.
The Jewish community has, of course, been persecuted for millennia simply for existing. People of color have been persecuted for centuries simply for existing. Women of every sort have been persecuted since the world began simply for existing.
What happened to the people of Israel on October 7 should never have happened. Period. It was horrifying and heartbreaking. My heart also goes out to the people of Palestine, not Hamas mind you, but to the ordinary people. Many of them are just people trying to live their lives and they are being killed by the thousands.
In Gaza, Homosexual activity between men, and only between men, is forbidden under the British Mandate Criminal Code Ordinance 1936. Were I in Gaza, they could imprison me for up to ten years for simply being who I am. Not so much with the LGBTQ rights in the Palestinian world. I look at some of the people in this country protesting and see them holding signs that say, “Queers for Palestine” and I think, really? That doesn’t stop me from looking on in abject horror at what is happening over there, but it does give me pause when I think about taking to the streets for them.
There is no question in my mind that Hamas committed a crime against humanity when they did what they did on October 7. No question whatsoever. There is also no question in my mind that Russia is in the wrong for invading Ukraine. Beyond that, though, I don’t fully understand the nuances and the history behind these fights. I know more about some than I do about others, but even so, I don’t feel I know nearly enough to actively protest for or against a particular side.
Our planet is extremely small. There are a lot of us living on it. We had better start figuring out how to co-exist or it isn’t going to end well. Were somebody to organize a march for peace everywhere, mind you, I’d be right there.
The war I have the closest connection to is weirdly the one in Syria. The reason I say that is because about ten years ago, I went to Greece with a group of performers and spent some time in a Syrian refugee camp that was set up about an hour north of Athens.
The fallout from all these armed conflicts is that countless millions of people get displaced when the fighting starts. When armies start shooting each other, you had better get out of the way. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, since the civil war in Syria started nearly 14 million Syrian people have been forced to flee their homes. Resources in the country are almost non-existent. 90 percent of the Syrian population that are still there now live below the poverty line.
As if things weren’t bad enough, a year ago, two massive earthquakes struck the region which destroyed whatever was left of the infrastructure that hadn’t been bombed. People are trying to exist while living in rubble.
The people we met in the Greek camp a decade ago were people just like any of us. They were middle-class professionals. Many were college-educated. There were whole families living in the tents together. One guy I talked to had remodeled kitchens back in Syria and showed me pictures of his work on his iPhone.
That was ten years ago. My guess is that he is still there in that same tent. Greece is currently housing about 50,000 Syrians in its camps.
Before the war in Syria started, the United States government was hoping for a regime change. It’s unclear what involvement we may have had in sparking the fight. We did start helping the side our government was rooting for about three years in. Trying to sort out what is going on there now is extremely difficult. Left-wing, right-wing, and libertarian groups all have completely different takes on the situation. The only thing they all seem to agree on is that there are about a thousand American troops and consultants currently on the ground in Syria.
One of the biggest problems we are facing in the United States is immigration. There are simply too many people trying to get in. We are not alone in this. That some of this crisis is a result of our own meddling in other people’s affairs is something we are going to have to face up to. How do we solve this? I got nuthin’. We have a year of political speeches ahead of us to look forward to. I can’t wait to hear what they all suggest.
I don’t feel like I am in any sort of position to fix the world. I will advocate for diplomacy and peace to my dying day, but how to fix the world is beyond me. My teeth, however, those I can do something about.
Twenty-four hours have passed since I wrote that last sentence. Life interrupted me.
Michael got back from visiting our friend in the eldercare facility across the river in New Jersey. When she first moved into the place, she had to leave a lot of her stuff behind. She’s been an actress and a writer so her old Village apartment was full to bursting with plays and memorabilia. Some of it Michael and I kept and some of it we had to give away. The time has finally come when she needs the next level of care. This means that she must now move into an even smaller room and this time she will have a roommate. In these new digs, she is allowed to take even fewer things with her than she had before. As a result, there are now a few more boxes of her stuff in our hallway. In theory, we are just holding onto it all for her, but… Old age eventually makes refugees of us all.
I took a charcoal drawing that she thought I might like as well as a stunning photograph of her from a role she once played, around the corner to get reframed.
I then took a walk and along the way picked up some supplies that we needed – deodorant, hair gel, and a few rolls of scotch tape. Later, Michael and I had tickets to a Broadway play called Purlie Victorious. After that was over, we went to Joe Allen’s to grab a bite and talk about it. Then we came home.
This morning, instead of writing, I woke up early, walked about thirty blocks down Central Park West, and gave myself over to the dentist. My mouth was stretched open with this thing that looked like it was a left-over prop from the movie A Clockwork Orange. The dentist put gunk on my teeth and then aimed a blue death ray into my mouth for four fifteen-minute bursts.
My teeth are now nothing if not white. For the next couple of days, I’m not supposed to eat or drink anything with any sort of pigment in it. The enamel needs time to recover and seal back up.
All of that is to say that I am living my perfectly ordinary, privileged, and indulged life here in New York City, while millions of other people in every corner of the Earth can’t. I have no doubt that there are countless people in refugee camps who before the wars forced them from their homes, whitened their teeth too. They went to plays and picked up things at the store that their partners itemized for them on lists.
We are not as far away from the collapse of our way of life as some might think. For Christmas, Michael gave me a copy of Neil Gaiman and Terry Patchett’s book, Good Omens. I devoured it right away. In it, one of them wrote, “It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.”
General William Tecumseh Sherman famously said, “War is hell.” Equally famously, Jean-Paul Sartre said, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” Or “Hell is other people.”
As we go into this election year, I think we all need to constantly remind ourselves just how very fortunate so many of us are. We shouldn’t take what we have for granted.
As our apartment becomes a refugee camp of sorts for the art and other things that once belonged to our dead and dying friends, I am constantly reminded that none of us own anything. At best, we lease it for the few years we are given to be here on this planet.
While I agree with General Sherman’s quote, I disagree with Sartre’s. Hell is not other people. I think it is what other people do. I’d like to think there’s a difference. If I’m right, then that gives us a choice. If I am wrong, then we are all just going to keep shooting at each other until there’s nothing left.
I believe that I am right. I have to believe that I am right.
Thanks for “thought walk”. I believe there are many of us walking with you and mulling how we interact with the world as it is today. After I read your post I clicked on my NYT online edition. At the very top it said LIVE: The New Hampshire Primary….The Oscar Nominations…Widening Mideast Crisis. Each had the number of minutes since being updated. Two were within 5 and the third was 34.
What a world. Just keep on keeping on…joy in the arts, writing and searching for perspective, feeling good and taking care of yourself and yours, and doing good for others. One step at a time. 🌟
You were able to put into words my ever present emotional turmoil re the state of our world. So many levels of distress....
Thank you.