Yesterday was, of course, last year and day to look back on what, surprisingly from this vantage point, might be a year we look back on with great fondness because it started our country and planet on the way back. But yesterday, was the day when the New York Times also carried a paragraph that should give hope to even the most worried among us that things are going to get better.


The situation around Gaza is as sad a way to end the year and, as always when looking toward that part of the world, carries with it the possibilities of something which could get much worse, very quickly. The "I/P" issues (I only learned this nomenclature in the last week) are, of course, extremely polarizing and debating them almost invariably demonstrates, more acutely at Daily Kos than almost anywhere else, how difficult it will be to resolve so many points of view so that the people who live there can do so without the steady threat of war.

And so, on the last day of 2008, the Times filed another report about a day of bombing and blasting in and from Gaza. It was not the headline "Amid a Buildup of Its Forces, Israel Ponders a Cease-Fire" that provided hope. Cease fires don't seem to mean much, especially to Hamas, and Israel's "ponder[ing]" does not seem all that intense.

But Ethan Bronner and Tahgreed El-Khodary, who shared the byline on this piece, datelined from Jerusalem, also reported about a bombing in Gaza City near the main government compound and the Nakhala family, which, they said, "lives next to the compound" and the concerns of the father Osama Nakhala, who di not know where to go from his evacuated and now damaged building.

And then there was the paragraph which symbolizes the hope that is in the air, not just in the Middle East but in the United States as well:

His 13-year-old son, Yousef, was with him. When asked his view of the situation, Yousef took an unusual stand for someone in Gaza, where Israel is being cursed by most everyone. "I blame Hamas. It doesn't want to recognize Israel. If they did so there could be peace," he said. "Egypt made a peace treaty with Israel, and nothing is happening to them."

That, we can all hope, is the sign. Yousef Nakhala spoke for so many children, and young adults with less experience with a "father's hell" than the rest of us about moving past what has gotten us to this point and finding a better way to live with one another. Gay-baiting and racism in this country may have met their match, too, in a generation that sees to have trouble seeing what all the fuss is about.

Yes, the southern parts of the United States, 140 years plus after the Civil War, is still voting as if these issues of the past were still paramount, but they are disappearing fast through the rest of the country, and maybe, just maybe, the rest of the world and our own former confederacy will follow. I wonder how much longer things like "don't ask, don't tell," Prop 8, or the cynical use of race employed by the low life who continues to be the Governor of Illinois, will continue to work.

Not long, I hope.

I read what young Yousef Nakhala told the New York Times, picked up my car from the the shop which was doing a little minor work on it, and began humming Graham Nash's lyrics from another hopeful time, one that did not quite pan out the way we thought it might, but may have found its moment today.

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.

Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

And you, of tender years,
Can't know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.


Can you hear and do you care and
Cant you see we must be free to
Teach your children what you believe in.
Make a world that we can live in.

Teach your parents well,
Their children's hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

Happy New Year.