This commentary is by Jim Tomczak, a resident of Milton.
Who decides what is sacred? Is it on a first-come, first-served basis? Does precedent declare the winners? Why can’t it be shared? Why is it protected so viciously?
In June 1967, I began delivering the Buffalo Courier Express to 40 or so customers early morning before school. This removed me from the server list for 7 a.m. Mass, avoiding the always grumpy monsignor.
The first headline I brought to sleeping porches was the story of the beginning of the Six-Day War in the Holy Land. The front page had maps featuring various sized curved arrows showing the punch of the attacks and small explosive asterisks to mark the battles of engagement.
If you wanted to know the state of affairs in the world on this June morning, you were dependent on a seventh-grader placing the paper in the right door in the right house. You could turn on the top-40 AM radio news throughout the day, but real information had to wait until the evening when Walter, Chet and David would deliver the news to you, or wait for next week when Life magazine was printed.
People slept better back then.
Of course, the war and carnage did not affect my suburban life; it was far away. Won by the good guys in a rout that reminds me of Super Bowl XXVII, the war changed the dynamics left over from previous wars. But war never finds finality, since it contains its own holiness.
On the occasion of the next war, according to the folks who name these things, my situation was quite different. A 19-year-old working a factory job in a large college town while my future wife attended school. Time and Newsweek brought the dramatic news of the Watergate scandal tighter around the president’s neck. Committee hearings, revelations galore, only to be interrupted by the conflicts of October 1973.
Flush with my second paycheck, I struggled to hitch my normal rides to my apartment after work. The streets were strangely silent. The normally busy downtown was empty. It was a nice, sunny afternoon. First-shift workers from the factories in town — there were many factories — seemed to head straight home.
I was told by a roommate, a second-year law student, that the president had declared a nuclear emergency or something to that effect, due to another war in the Holy Land that required our direct involvement.
I walked to a restaurant, had a fine meal in an empty place, found my way to the college for fun and frolic and turned off the news for the next couple of days. I was a little shook by the emptiness of the streets and the words “nuclear war” because I knew the bombs could fly at any moment and I was 19 with plans, but I was not affected in any way in the war or the aftermath of the war, since I did not have a car and gas prices were irrelevant, as they are today.
Over the next 50 years, the terrorist murders and vicious reprisals held a place in the news. Presidents holding up signed documents, peace plans named after the faraway places where they were signed, Nobel Peace Prizes, dull lulls in violence offering the chance to reload or adjust strategies, small wars and the threats of larger wars. Economics. Butcher tactics.
The news, and so much more, now carried along in my pocket.
Throughout all this, the land remains holy while the atrocities are too numerous to count. There is no solution other than to suspend beliefs, and that is far down the agenda.
This is a terrible flaw in the human condition but that is news to no one.
