A poem many of my gen­er­a­tion tacked on our bed­room wall includ­ed the line: “And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the uni­verse is unfold­ing as it should.” Depend­ing on your point of view, that was either com­fort­ing or dis­con­cert­ing. I won­der which one the author, Amer­i­can poet and writer Max Ehrmann, would have felt if he’d penned it today, rather than in 1927.

Among the video unfold­ing out of Gaza is Pales­tini­ans flee­ing on foot, car­ry­ing the arche­typ­i­cal “pathet­ic bun­dles” of refugees. The supreme irony is that many Israeli Jews num­ber refugees in their lin­eage, and vir­tu­al­ly every­one who lives in Gaza is either a refugee who fled the found­ing of the state of Israel in 1948, or the descen­dant of one.
Mean­while: in a world a uni­verse away, bare­ly a day goes by with­out an over-wrought sto­ry of thou­sands brav­ing end­less lines and online fren­zies to obtain tick­ets for Tay­lor Swift con­certs — in 2024.
At most they’re suf­fer­ing frus­tra­tion and self-inflict­ed angst that they might not get a chance to pay an uncon­scionable sum to see a bil­lion­aire pop star in person.
In an assess­ment of Gaza, the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion said the risk of dis­ease is soar­ing in over­crowd­ed shel­ters, which lack access to safe water and hygiene facil­i­ties. Since mid-Octo­ber, about a week after the Gaza war kicked off, more than 33,000 cas­es of diar­rhea have been report­ed, along with sca­bies, chick­en­pox, skin rash­es and upper res­pi­ra­to­ry infections.
Even basic med­ical sup­plies are report­ed­ly scarce to non-existent.
Mean­while: in safe places Gazans dare not even dream of reach­ing, under the catchall slo­gan “aging is a dis­ease that can be con­quered” sales of snake oil pills, lotions, potions and diets that range from bor­ing to revolt­ing, to attain longevi­ty are soaring.
There is, it seems, no end to the gulli­bil­i­ty of peo­ple, or at least those with a ten­u­ous grasp on real­i­ty, or what makes life worth living.
And on that sub­ject, in the first month of the Israel-Gaza war, 39 mem­bers of the media were killed. It was the dead­liest month for those who ded­i­cate their life to wit­ness­ing and chron­i­cling the hor­rors of con­flict since the Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect Jour­nal­ists start­ed gath­er­ing data in 1992.

         ELSEWHERE AND EVERYWHERE

The last twelve months have been the hottest the Earth expe­ri­enced has in the mod­ern era, prob­a­bly the hottest in 125,000 years. The plan­et is per­ilous­ly close to the pre­dict­ed glob­al warm­ing of 1.5 degrees Cel­sius above pre-indus­tri­al norms that is the bench­mark for irre­versible dam­age and poten­tial destruc­tion of entire ecosys­tems. That is most decid­ed­ly not the way the uni­verse should be unfolding.
It’s unlike­ly many of Gaza’s 2.3‑million peo­ple have read the numer­ous UN and oth­er stud­ies of the effect it will have on world food sup­plies. They already lack suf­fi­cient food to the point where accord­ing to a World Food Pro­gramme assess­ment, mal­nu­tri­tion looms over them.
Mean­while: A U.S. health-track­ing poll found that “45% of peo­ple are inter­est­ed in tak­ing a safe and effec­tive weight loss med­ica­tion.” Sales are expect­ed to increase by tens of bil­lions of dol­lars over the next few years.
The immoral­i­ty of a mar­ket for weight loss is that huge food short­ages  in one part of the world and star­va­tion in oth­ers, not just Gaza, being a way for the uni­verse to be “unfold­ing as it should” ought to be self-evident.
As for an end game unfold­ing in the con­flict, the lat­est and best, or more cor­rect­ly only, post-war plan comes from U.S. Sec­re­tary of State Antho­ny Blinken, who said  it “must include Pales­tin­ian-led gov­er­nance and Gaza uni­fied with the West Bank under the Pales­tin­ian Authority.”
That’s anoth­er way of say­ing an even­tu­al “two state solu­tion”, which is the essence of how  the  1993 Oslo Accords intend­ed the Pales­tin­ian-Israeli con­flict to even­tu­al­ly unfold.
It’s the antithe­sis of what Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Binyamin Netanyahu wants and has made his polit­i­cal career try­ing to achieve, so there’s a lot of unfold­ing yet.
How­ev­er, it’s def­i­nite­ly a step up on White House spokesman John Kirby’s offer­ing that the admin­is­tra­tion is “keep­ing in our thoughts and prayers the many, many thou­sands of inno­cent Pales­tini­ans who have been killed in the con­flict…”and is “mind­ful” of the suf­fer­ing of the injured and wounded.
How­ev­er you choose to inter­pret the wis­dom of Max Ehrmann, hope­ful­ly that of the 3rd cen­tu­ry Greek philosopher Sex­tus Empir­i­cus will pre­vail: ‘The mills of the gods grind slow­ly, but they grind small.” 

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