Israel, Iran, Lebanon and Trump: When ill luck begins…

“When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.” Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson.

A rain of ill luck is drenching Iranians as the most devastating bombs ever made pour on them, compounding the crushing heel of totalitarian geriatric mullahs, who hanker for a 1,400-year-old moment of imagined pristine communion with their Shia Islamic God.

And ill luck continues to shower upon Israel’s Jews still struggling to survive after more than 3,000 years of real suffering that continues to this day despite their military being feared as the region’s most terrifying.

Their secret service unrelentingly discovers their enemies’ grandest secrets, challenging John Updike’s assertion that the shame is not that there are spies “but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few”.

What more does ill luck plan for the impoverished people of South Lebanon? They are ordered to exit lock stock and barrel, over 750,000 of them, within a handful of hours to escape blanket bombing by Israel’s coldly efficient air force. Through no fault of their own, some thousands of suicidal Hezbollah fighters are using them as human shields to lob rockets across the border into northern Israel.

The rock upon which all that ill luck stands is US President Donald Trump, Chairman of the global Board of Peace, claimant to the Nobel prize for peace and sovereign of our earth’s most destructive-ever military force. He commands almost limitless lightning bolts of high tech weapons and budgets that defy most writers of science fiction.

And here we are, the rest of us, wringing hands as our hearts bleed tears at the stream of horrifying images and careerist commentators insisting that the non-Israelis being bombed into the other world alongside warriors are evil incarnate in biblical terms.

The certifying authorities of God’s own truth are Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, self-anointed thought leaders of scholarship.

Meanwhile, those that claim the mantles of this planet’s most ancient civilizations, the current rulers of India and China, gargle in their self-sanctified silence at the epic pain being inflicted on their competitor cradles of humankind, the Persians and Jews.

I’ll pause here, awaiting return of a temperate sun and gentle breezes because offering comment amid thunderstorms may provoke tsunamis of some hearts’ tears that sweep aside the self-restraint necessary for civil coexistence on our only planetary home.

Let’s hope and pray that spring doesn’t forget to reappear after this bone-chilling winter. For now, our solace is nature journalist Hal Borland’s confidence that “No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn”.