If you find putting the seem­ing­ly end­less wel­ter of news about suf­fer­ing and depri­va­tion into per­spec­tive daunt­ing, to the point where ignor­ing it is eas­i­er, try look­ing at it through the prism of a glass of water.

Safe drink­ing water was rec­og­nized as a human right by the UN Gen­er­al Assem­bly as part of bind­ing inter­na­tion­al law in 2010.
Life as we know it can­not exist with­out water.
Most of us take it so much for grant­ed, we don’t think twice about  run­ning a tap until it’s cold enough to drink and then toss away what­ev­er is left when our thirst is slaked.
Yet, more than 2 bil­lion peo­ple do not have access to safe­ly man­aged drink­ing water.
Every day, more than 1,000 chil­dren under the age of five die from dis­eases relat­ed to a lack of clean water .
Now con­sid­er a recent gush about “six very seri­ous peo­ple” who “…swished and gazed thought­ful­ly into the mid­dle dis­tance…” as they tast­ed 107 vari­eties of min­er­al water as if  they were fine wines and then “dumped the excess into buck­ets at their feet and joked about need­ing a bathroom.”
That’s not a snide way of say­ing I think human suf­fer­ing in deprived parts of the world should require those in bet­ter devel­oped or more priv­i­leged places to eschew enjoy­ing what is avail­able to them.
But it does illus­trate the gulf between those blessed by geog­ra­phy and  those cursed by it.
The water at our Ontario cot­tage comes from a well drilled just shy of 100 meters deep in the gran­ite of the Cana­di­an Shield, where a geol­o­gist  told me it was. trapped by the Ice Age, which means it could be more than two and a half mil­lion years old.
It almost cer­tain­ly doesn’t meet the exact­ing stan­dards (or snob val­ue) of those will­ing to pay the “water som­me­liers”  but  it comes out of the tap ice cold,  tastes just fine and accord­ing to a lab analy­sis, is pur­er than the com­mon bot­tled brands.

                 BY WAY OF COMPARISON

Accord­ing to the Oxford Polit­i­cal Review, the prin­ci­ple of right­eous con­duct of war “ broad­ly rec­og­nizes water infra­struc­ture as pro­tect­ed dur­ing wartime.”
The Inter­na­tion­al Com­mit­tee of the Red Cross not­ed in a recent review that: “Crimes against water may rep­re­sent vio­la­tions not only of domes­tic crim­i­nal laws but also of inter­na­tion­al human­i­tar­i­an law and human rights law.”
Fresh water was an inte­gral part of the dai­ly flow of aid into Gaza that was stopped by Israel, which also cut off elec­tric­i­ty to and bombed desali­na­tion plants for good measure.
In March, Medecins Sans Fron­tieres con­clud­ed that the Israelis were using water as a weapon in the Gaza conflict.
Even before the cur­rent war, the aquifer which sup­plied about 90 per­cent of Gaza’s water was “brack­ish and con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed due to sea­wa­ter intru­sion, overex­trac­tion, and sewage and chem­i­cal infiltration.”
The only good news in that for Gaza is that it might sub­vert Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s grandiose (and almost cer­tain­ly ille­gal) fan­ta­sy of depop­u­lat­ing the ruins of Gaza and turn­ing it into his idea of a “riv­iera”, com­plete with golf courses.
Depend­ing on cli­mate and loca­tion, an 18-hole golf course can use an aver­age of 2.08 bil­lion gal­lons of water per day. Brack­ish is no more high­ly rec­om­mend­ed for the links than it is for humans.
In his elec­tion vic­to­ry speech Trump said: “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop the wars.”
No one could dis­pute that as a fine ide­al. But so far, the Mid­dle East is prov­ing to be a place where what ought to be the ver­dant rewards of peace, dry to dust before they take root, nev­er mind get irrigated.
In a pre­scient arti­cle in1984, the jour­nal­ist John K. Coo­ley wrote: “…long after oil runs out, water is like­ly to cause wars, cement peace and make and break empires and alliances in the region, as it has for thou­sands of years.”
His­to­ry, espe­cial­ly in the Mid­dle East, gives lit­tle grounds for believ­ing that uni­ver­sal peace and equal­i­ty is any more  real­is­tic than find­ing lead­ers with the abil­i­ty – and human­i­ty – to fig­ure out they ought to spend less time and mon­ey on destruc­tion and more on pro­vid­ing and ensur­ing the  human right to clean and suf­fi­cient water.
Maybe the answer is pro­vid­ing them with a glass of water they can look through, but not drink until they under­stand that.

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