The World Cup fills with human interest as the number of Israeli attacks on Gaza go unheeded

I can’t even walk in the quiet of Riverside Park and sit on a bench with my wife without seeing a field of roided soccer players running about as if it were The World Cup games. We came to the park to catch the sunset-henge flashing its orange-gold brilliance in a beautiful sky over the Hudson River. Too soon the dusk descended like the dark night of merciless Israeli attacks on Gaza, presumably for Hamas shelling.

Of course, the Gazans are blamed to be vicious for killing no one, but there’s ‘no comment’ on the Israeli air strikes that have killed more than 170 Palestians (most of them women and children), so far, according to Reuters.

Additionally, The Guardian reports that the U.S., which means Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, supports without reservation the air war on a largely defenseless population.” But White House remarks went far beyond that, blessing the murderers and castigating the victims.

The White House condemned the rocket attacks against Israel. ‘No country can accept rocket fire aimed at civilians and we support Israel’s right to ‘defend itself’ against these vicious attacks,’ said White House spokesman Josh Earnest. So, once again the Israeli beast slaughters the lambs of Gaza. And the voice of AIPAC triumphs over truth.

The obscenity of the imbalance of these attacks is a moral and ethical disgrace to humanity—the same humanity that sits in stadiums like the Romans did once, watching lions eat Christians. They fill bars and public places, feeble faces hedonistically cheering their “team to win” as if it were anything but a commercial ploy by sports executives to uplift their “sport” over all other interests, like life over death. When was it, beyond Rome or Nazi Germany, Hiroshima and Nagasaki did human beings act like this—and with such indifference? If it weren’t for a few respectable news services and eye witnesses’ reporting, the World Cup interest in grown men kicking a ball about, into a net past a goalie would be obscene and ludicrous. And here we are, my wife and I, having to stare at the neighborhood idiots kicking their balls around, hopefully literally.

I need to pound on this excess like a drum to wake up America to its realities. like so many others we have in our world today; in the financial markets with a handful of multi-billionaires (the 1%) feeding on the (99%); in the endless war-making in the Middle East; in America being one nation under surveillance; whistleblowers being considered the criminals; after the War on Terror never being openly solved, on 911 being just another day in September. America you’ve lost your way. Your moral compass is spinning to every destination where a buck can be made for the idle-minded masses’ entertainment. Here where the poor go to bed at night hungry, waking with small chance for some advancement from their sad their lives. Only the pleasures of slaves are left for them.

Life has become insignificant for the non-entrepreneurs. Corporate Capitalism has been totally corrupted. As William Butler Yeats’ in his great poem “The Second Coming,” it has come to fruition . . . The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Follow its logic closely for the revelations of where we are and have become.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Is that what it will take to straighten out this world: The return of another Christ child? Or is it mankind itself that needs to be climbing from an eerie barbed-wire cradle into life, simply to attain the beauty of a peaceful life.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.

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