How you might ask will this writer tie the deaths of four to five hundred people he doesn’t even know to the word good.  The answer is simple; he can’t. So I will write about something closer to penance.  I can’t explain what is happening in Gaza that is good any more the than author, Thornton Wilder, in his classic novel “The Bridge Over San Louis Rey” could rationally explain the deaths of five people who randomly died in the collapse of a rope bridge in Peru.  

The novel I am talking about was required reading when I was in the eighth grade and tries to make rational sense of when people crossing a rope bridge, presumed so safe no one thinks about it, die when the bridge inexplicably collapses dropping them into the abyss.  When I was a child we were warned through our education in literature and humanities to think about fate.   I am grateful for the warning because that piece of my education allows me to say now in my 75th year that war is different than fate.  War is a decision originated in humankind and not the “Gods of fate.”  My education, and thank you teachers in Cody, Powell, and Thermopolis Wyoming, who taught me allowing me to conclude the difference between fate and war is decision.  The most recent deaths in the middle east conflict trace their origins in thinking errors and bad decisions over a time period more than just a few years or months.  Those deaths began thousands of years back, crossed these many generations and only found their fatal expression last week in this current milieu.  Among the deaths of those four to five hundred people could have been you or me for I am pretty sure none of us are more innocent or less guilty than most who died.  War is always the result of bad decisions piling up until finally a fire ignites and too many people, involved in the decisions or not, die in the fire. 

Good begins when we obey our religious moral traditions and craft our decisions around what is generally believed to be the Golden Rule.  Consider if what is done to others would be fine if it were done to you.  If not, you must change the strategy and intention.  The rules that generate  these wars are wrong, and as a consequence evil, however intentional or unintentional, occurs. Good is drilling down to the heart and revising the current set of rules that govern our lives and make war inevitable. The painful drill down is the penance.  We are, everyone of us, morally obligated to change the trance that takes us down that path called war.  Survival and death are war’s products. Life and peace are good’s outcome.  It truly shouldn’t be so hard to decide.