We've gotta stop bombing each other.

A prayer.

I haven’t checked the news in five months, not since my son was born. It’s been good, really good, like stepping out of a swamp, rinsing off under a waterfall, and then sundrying on the riverbanks. Still, there’s no escaping the swamp. Not really. I hear word of the various catastrophes in motion. The disastrous confusion of our times. The lunacy we live in. The snaking tendrils of our collective pain penetrate and permeate my silence.

Which is a good thing, I suppose.

Because it would be irresponsible to live in ignorance. I do want to know, the same way I want to know the cause of the occasional traffic jam on my way to work. Was it a wreck? How bad? Anyone injured, dead? When finally the slow-rolling vehicular stream on 295 carries me past the accident I rubberneck like everyone else, try to get a glimpse of the damage before continuing on my basically merry way.

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Yes, I want to see, but not so much that I’ll be incapacitated by grief and shock.

Yes, I want to feel, but just enough to know I’m still human, still capable of the requisite emotions one ought to feel when confronted by tragedy.

Yes, I want to know, of course, for sure, but only just enough, not so much that I’ll have to stop, get out, change my day up, change my life. I have a family to feed now. Gotta get to work. Or I gotta get home, gotta see my boy, my wife, so let’s keep it moving, people, so sorry about the crash hope everyone’s okay now can someone hurry up and please clear the rubbish ASAP so we can get back to business as usual at 80 miles an hour because this bumper to bumper really isn’t working for me I’m starting to get hangry, you know?

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I don’t know. That’s where I find myself in this traffic jam. I don’t know.

What to say or do about the breathtaking collision that’s happening right now on the road ahead? The bombing of Iran. The bombing of Palestine. The bombing of Israel. The bombing of Ukraine, Russia. Where else are we bombing each other? Google knows, just like it knows about the crash up ahead on 295. Quick search. Ah, yes. We are bombing each other in Syria, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Ethiopia, Turkey. The list goes on.

And we should probably include in our list the mass shootings, too. Those are definitely a part of the pileup. Plenty of mass shootings happening all the time in the US at this point.

But why stop at mass shootings? Any shooting, any incident of violence ought to be identified as a part of this one interconnected and singular tragedy that’s been in motion for thousands of years now, the shock waves moving through the ages, through our bodies, the cars of ourselves slamming into each other from one generation to the next.

When does it stop? And how? How do we end this madness?

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We’re so deep into the madness that the question of how to end it comes off as naive. Soft-brained. Poor kid, he doesn’t understand how the world works. Even as I ask the question, I can hear the tut-tutting of the politicians, the diplomats, the revolutionaries inside my own head: This is just how it goes. This is just what we do, what we have to do.

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Maybe it is childish to wonder how and when the madness will end. But maybe a child’s view is exactly what’s missing here. Maybe the emperor has no clothes. Maybe we need a kid to cry out, “Uh, that dude is naked, y’all,” and then actually listen.

Here’s what that means, in this case:

It’s not okay to hurt other people. To punch someone in the face. To push them down on the sidewalk. To bomb them. To rip their bodies apart. Tear off their limbs. Puncture their bellies, their eyeballs. Shatter their skulls. It’s just not okay, guys. Not cool. Not acceptable. The emperor has no clothes, understand? It’s Humanity 101. Thou shalt not annihilate each other. Just don’t do it, k? Let’s get back to basics.

Well hold on a second, you pie-in-the-sky pacifist. What if someone bombs you? Bombs your family? Bombs your people. Fuck you if you think we’re not entitled to hit back. Or no, not even fuck you. You don’t get a fuck you. You get nothing. You’re just irrelevant. And dismissed from this conversation. G’bye.

This is what it all comes down to, isn’t it? The question underneath it all, the critical choice point, the juncture where the crash continues, or where it ends: If I’ve been deeply hurt, and I am in danger of being hurt again, is it not my right, and even my responsibility, to hurt back?

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I’ve never been bombed. Never been shot at. Not even mugged. My parents never hit me. I wasn’t bullied, beat up in school. I don’t have the lived experience that would give me the authority to speak about the hardcore non-violence it will take to end the madness once and for all.

It’s easy for me to say that we need to hold a hard line when it comes to violence. That it’s never okay. That it’s a symptom of a much deeper issue: the illusion of separation. And then I can say that this issue is, in fact, the deepest issue of them all, the root cause of all suffering. I can really get going on this one, the illusion of separation. I can quote King and Gandhi, Mother Theresa and the Buddha, Jesus, all the heavyweights. I can point out that we are not, in fact, separate from one another, that we do indeed belong to each other, that we are inextricably interconnected, inescapably interdependent, that our interbeingness is irreducible, is what it all comes down to, is the only-and-always truth, such that to hurt another is to hurt oneself, etc, etc, and then I can go on to say, off the cuff like this, that it’s therefore not a stretch to make the claim that any form of violence is essentially a form of clinical insanity. But I say all this from the comfort of my air-conditioned Subaru in the standstill on 295. It doesn’t cost me anything to say it. My car hasn’t been hit. My body hasn’t been wounded. My son, my wife, all of my family are alive and well.

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And right on cue, my son just awakened in the other room, where he’s been slumbering beside Tana while I’ve been writing through the dawn. She called me in to take him, so I did. This was all just minutes ago. I lifted him from the bed, his chubby heft, his perfect sleepiness, his absolute innocence and goodness and sanctity, and I wondered, just minutes ago, what would I do, where would I stand, if he was bombed, blown apart. If the madness took my baby from me, would I not go mad?

Now he is lying in the bed next to my desk, watching me while I write this, and then turning his godly gaze to look out the window, drawn by the new day’s light, and then drawn again back to me, this man he is slowly beginning to recognize, perhaps even to enjoy somewhat sometimes. He’s talking now, in the language that only babies speak, which is the language we all need to learn again somehow, the language of our essential innocence, our inviolable goodness, our sanctity.

We were all babies once. It’s just not okay to kill babies. But if my baby was killed, if my baby was killed…

He’s starting to make the sounds now of a growing discontent, there in the bed next to my desk. Of a desire for something else, something different. This, I understand, means he will want to be picked up soon. Held. Any minute now. He is getting to that point—and it’s escalating every word I write—where he wants to feel me with him, feel his body on mine, feel not-alone there in that bed, here in this world, this highway of the cosmos. And now, in just another moment, it will be time to take him up in my arms, to hold him while I can, while there’s still time, in the midst of this vast uncontrollable wreck, these cars crashing all around us, the intractable standstill of history, moving through us, roadraging through us, and I have right now to carry him, with one arm because he’s strong enough at five months to hold himself up, so my left hand can finish this piece with a prayer for the bombed and a prayer for the bombers, a prayer for all of us in this accident that is no accident perhaps, is what we’ve come here to learn perhaps, to love, yes, what else, of course, this terrible mandate of love, this heartwrenching mystery, this prayer, this prayer, this impossible and unavoidable prayer of love, which we have to keep praying, praying without end, even if, even when, at last and for good, the bombing finally does.