Post 655 - September 23, 2024

Dinner conversation these days, no matter what the topic when we start, almost always ends up with us mired in politics. American politics. It’s unavoidable.

There are plenty of international events to discuss - the war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the recent attacks in Lebanon – but inevitably, we swing around to the upcoming elections in the United States. It’s bad enough when we are in America, but when we are overseas, forget about it. Everyone is fascinated and slightly horrified and looks to us for an explanation.

We, of course, don’t have one so we try and steer the talk back to war.

As of this morning, as I write these words, the Geneva Academy is monitoring 110 armed conflicts around the world.

In the Middle East and Northern Africa, fighting is ongoing in Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, and Western Sahara. Most of these are non-international conflicts or NIACs, involving different factions from within the borders of a country who are fighting against each other.

The United States is directly involved in two ongoing military actions in that region: the Yemeni Civil War, and the Syrian Civil War. The Russians and the Lebanese Hezbollah terrorist group are also playing a part in the unrest in Syria. Syria, in fact, is experiencing multiple internal fights, two military occupations, and three international armed battles.

In Africa, the countries in conflict are Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan.

Of these, the United States is directly involved in the war in Somalia. Other Western countries are intervening in Burkina Faso, Mali, Mozambique, and Nigeria.

The Central African Republic is experiencing the greatest number of separate internal conflicts when compared to the rest of Africa.

In Asia, multiple internal wars are being fought in Afghanistan, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Two international conflicts are being fought by India – one involving Pakistan and the other, China.

Pakistan and the Philippines lead the list in Asia with the most ongoing fighting. They are amid six internal armed insurrections each.

In Europe, Russia is currently occupying parts of Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. Armenia is fighting with Azerbaijan.

In Ukraine, there are two non-international internal fights underway inside its borders in addition to its overarching external conflict with Russia.

Mexico and Colombia in Latin America, as of this writing, are each fighting three armed internal non-international civil clashes.

American soldiers are not only on the ground and fighting in Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, there are also 160,000 troops on active duty in a whole variety of other countries all over the world.

Most of the wars I’ve mentioned are never mentioned in the American media. A few years ago, the Syrian Civil War was at the top of all our news feeds. There were demonstrations around the US. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and we stopped hearing about Syria. It was all Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. Again, there were demonstrations. Then Hamas attacked Israel, and the coverage of Ukraine nearly disappeared.

These days it seems that Gaza and Ukraine have almost equal shares of screen time. The rest, though, get nearly nothing.

In almost every armed conflict that Americans have been involved in that I can remember, we, the people, have seemed to align our allegiances on the same side. We have generally agreed on who we felt was in the right and who we felt was wrong. Sometimes, like during the war in Vietnam, many of us even sided against our own government.

The Israeli-Palestinian war is different. Nobody seems to agree about whose side we should be on. Pro-Israel, but Netanyahu should be removed from power, or pro-Palestine, but Hamas should be removed from power. Both sides have perpetrated atrocious acts against the other.

None of us have the full picture of any of the fighting that is happening anywhere in the world. Instead, we’ve pieced together our opinions from whatever news stories have been filtered through the media’s sieve.

In some cases, and Syria and Israel and Palestine come to mind first, our own actions historically, as well as those of our allies, may have helped lead to the fighting we are seeing today.

Syria and Gaza are bombed-out shells of the places they once were. Hundreds of thousands of people who once lived there have been killed or displaced.

The European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations group estimates that there are currently 120 million people worldwide who have been forced from their homes. 43.4 million of those people have had to flee their home countries and have become refugees. Three out of four of those refugees come from just five countries: Afghanistan, Venezuela, Syria, Ukraine, and Sudan.

 Our involvement in foreign wars, as a country, is often based on politics or economics in a way that few of us completely understand. What we are getting from our news outlets is, at best, incomplete, and at worst, deliberately misleading.

At dinner one evening early last week, there were six of us. We disagreed for hours on end, long into the night. On a few things, a couple of us aligned. Occasionally one of us would be left out on a limb with an opinion that was completely our own. Sometimes we would all agree on something in principle and then widely diverge on the specifics.

It was a lively conversation. None of us, of course, are experts in any of it. The information we are using to inform our opinions all comes from different places – each of those sources has its own biases and slants.

We all ended the dinner as the friends we were when we started. We left our hosts’ beautiful home and returned safely to ours having enjoyed each other’s company as well as a delicious home-cooked meal.

120 million people couldn’t do that last night because they had no homes to eat in let alone return to.

It is borderline senseless to argue which of those 110-armed conflicts is the worst. How can we say who is suffering the most? It’s all bad. It all must stop. We need to find a way to share this tiny, beautiful planet together. That might sound like pie-in-the-sky idealism, but we are rapidly approaching the point at which we will no longer have a choice. We cannot continue to allow ourselves to devolve into these senseless wars against each other. Either we will figure out how to coexist or we won’t exist at all.

Our planet has gotten very crowded. We are running out of room for us all to continue to live separately.

The election in the United States seems to be pushing us closer toward our own internal armed conflict. How far away we are from that remains to be seen. We have already experienced one violent insurrection when the losing side didn’t win the last election. Our two political parties have dug their heels in on where they stand, and they aren’t budging an inch. Each side is also fighting amongst themselves. Something is going to have to give.

I can look at the news coming out of Ukraine and Gaza and be saddened and appalled, but unless I am willing to go over there and fight for one side or the other, that’s about the extent of what I can do about it. The one practical thing I can do to help is vote.

We have been in Italy for most of the summer. The other day I was buying tequila at the local grocery store. As I walked back to my car an African guy asked me for some money. I smiled at him and said sorry and got into my car.

I was driving out of the parking lot, and I started thinking. What must what I had just done have looked like from even a few steps back? There I was double-fisting bottles of liquor and ignoring a man who was simply trying to get enough money together to buy a basic meal for his family.

There is a group of people who have come to our little Italian town from the Sudan. Some of them hang out at the supermarkets. Here, when you get a shopping cart, you need to insert a 1-euro coin to release the chain that’s keeping it from being stolen. When you bring the cart back and reconnect the chain, the euro pops out and is returned. Often, shoppers will let the Sudanese guys return the carts and keep the euros.

Life cannot be easy for them here in Italy. Jobs are extremely hard to come by even for native-born Italians. The Sudanese guys can speak enough Italian to get by and even a bit of English, but I’m not sure it’s enough for them to get anything but the most menial of work.

Add to that, that the Italians in general are just as distrustful of foreign immigrants as the Americans are.

One of the guys carves little hearts and letters out of olive wood and sells them outside the food store. He and I got into a conversation last Christmas which is when I learned he was from Sudan. We exchanged our names, but both of us seem to have forgotten what the other’s is. Since then, though, we always say hi to each other, when we run into each other. Michael and I have collected a whole trove of wooden hearts and letters. The hoard gets a little bit bigger every time we’re here.

The man I walked past the other day was not the same guy. I am only assuming that he’s from the same extended group from Sudan, but he might be from somewhere else entirely. I cannot begin to imagine what any of their lives have been like and what they have had to endure.

Ashamed of myself for walking past him, I stopped as I drove out and gave him enough money to feed his family that night. Did that solve his problem? No, not even close, but maybe it gave him just a little bit of a break so that he could think beyond merely trying to survive for a few hours and get some rest.

He is one of 120 million people who have been forced to leave their homes. For me today, he is the face of all these global wars. He deserves better.

We all do.

We should all be registered to vote. Voting is one of the few concrete things we can all do to affect change. It’s a few minutes out of the day and it can change everything.

After the ballots are cast, set the table, invite a few smart people over, and for heaven’s sake get back to the arguing. If you can stay open to the opinions you don’t agree with, it’s the best school there is.

What we are going through in terms of population displacement is nothing new. People have been shoving other people aside since time immemorial. What’s new now is the sheer number of people that have been forced to become refugees.

The answer is not to kick the refugees out. These are often educated people with valuable skill sets. Before they were forced to flee their countries, many held real jobs and had real lives just like ours.

Helping one person is always better than helping nobody. I don’t always remember that. We need each other.

This election cannot come soon enough.