Rereading To Kill a Mockingbird (and a plea to STOP VIOLENCE in Israel and Palestine)

I celebrated my 18 years of lifework this year as a public defender and finished rereading "To Kill A Mockingbird" with different set of eyes. 

I read this when I was in college when lawyering was still floating on jute (Galutaw pa sa tugabang, as we Ilonggos say) or when I still has no idea I would go to law school after college. 

First, it is still entertaining and I now recalled the "events" which I already forgot from my first reading as Scout is the best narrator. Second, it is full of devices that illustrate prejudice and racial discrimination, and full of questions that can hover above us. 

But one hovering current event I wanted to 

write something about is on Israel and Palestine and the Hamas. I wanted to grab again Yuval Noah Harari's book on challenges for 21st century (he is an Israeli political svience professor). I wanted to understand, but most of all I wanted to condemn violence. 

I don't care what the Bible and what the history books tell us or any other books. I don't care who is right and who is wrong. I care for the VIOLENCE to stop. It kills a human being and to stop violence is always doing the right thing. To stop doing violence is being human. 

Like in the book, if we consider that a black is a human being as citizen is a human being also, we can step back and be human beings.

 We can drop narratives perpetuating racial prejudice so we can drop narratives perpetuating violence in the name of nation, citizenship or political divide. 

We can drop narratives that war is an instrument of peace. We can drop narratives of past superiority or inferiority to justify violence.  

Because, not just because. 

Because in reality, we live in one earth which experiences warming, one earth with many illness coming out because of global climate change, one earth that if one country/nation/location is wiped out in the face of earth, we expect sooner or later our own country/nation/location is wiped out too.

 We live in one earth that if we drop a nuclear weapon in a country/nation/location it does not mean another country/nation/location is safe or the rest of Earth itself is safe. 

This kind of war, WAR AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE, is the war we should all be minding. Not boundaries that define our separateness. It served us in the past but it won't serve is in the future given our global connectedness.

STOP VIOLENCE.

GLOBAL COOPERATION FOR ONE EARTH.