Like many of you, I am glued to the news coming out of the Middle East. An ocean of virtual ink has been spilled this summer in debate over the Israel-Gaza war, the Israel-West Bank conflict, and the hard shift caliphate-building ISIS has brought as its taken hold across war-ravaged Syria and Iraq. And the reality is that heart-breaking recent events in Somalia, South Sudan and Ukraine are not disconnected from what is happening in the Middle East.
I am writing from a comfortable home in a Chicago suburb. A piece of my soul is not here, but is half a world away in the Middle East at any given moment of the day or night. As I type those words, releasing another bit of virtual ink into the blogosphere, I realize how lame they sound (“Easy for you to feel some emotion from the safety of a six thousand-mile distance, Michelle”) or, perhaps, how simple it would be to marginalize what I might say because of who I am and what I believe. [Read more]
