As I may have mentioned, I just came back from holiday in France. It was a wonderful fortnight of blazing hot sunshine, long lunches in the shade of the trees and lazy afternoons of torpid peacefullness. A perfect antidote to the increasing frenzy of a busy work and family life.
My sense of tranquility was soon to be brutally shattered on a lakeside not far from Carcassonne.
We had taken a picnic, and with our friends and their children had been swimming and lazing in the afternoon sun, congratulating our daughters on having swum unaided from one side of the lake to the other and back.
Quite unexpectedly, some clouds appeared from behind the trees, and in a few moments it started to rain. Great globs of cool rain, as the sun strangely continued to beat down upon us. It being my son’s birthday, we decided to pack up and decamp to the cafe for ice creams.
We sat and chatted as the rain came down and soon were tucking into a variety of Dames Blanches, sorbets and crepes with chocolate sauce and giant boules of vanilla ice cream.
With no warning, a massive bolt of lightning screamed from the sky, landing maybe 30 meters to my left. The simultaneous clap of thunder was loud enough to really make us jump. We thought no more of it until maybe a couple of minutes later a man came into the cafe asking if there was a doctor there. They phoned for an ambulance but I reflected that since we were a good 45 minutes from the nearest town, it’d better not be urgent. Â
I went down to the beach to see a group of men purposefully giving vigorous mouth to mouth resuscitation to a clearly lifeless corpse laid out on the beach, as his horrified children looked on. The boy was maybe ten, old enough to realise the significance of what had just happened, his face racked with pain and fear as he howled ‘Papa, Papa, Papa’ again and again and again, inconsolably. The girl was younger, maybe seven, there in blank, uncomprehending wide-eyed horror as an older woman tried to lead her away.
I returned to England a few days later to see war again in Lebanon. And realised that although we have become quite used to seeing footage of hysterical mothers, wives and sisters in ‘other countries’ or despairing, grief-stricken fathers and brothers carrying the dead bodies of their children from the wreckage of bombing, we remain distant from the reality of the pain and suffering that we cause.
As we allow our leaders to play the game of the ‘big picture’, we also allow ourselves to ignore the sole function of the bombs, the guns, the planes and the tanks that our industries strive so hard to manufacture and our politicians and businessmen work so hard to sell.
We allow ourselves time and time again to be drawn into the reckless and stupid idea that somehow through violence we can achieve peace.