When you follow death home

Today, I followed death home. Though I do not profess to be an avid follower of current events, I do my best to stay informed of the happenings outside my tiny sphere of life. As I drove to work this morning, NRP slowly drawing my mind from the groggy realms of sleep I had shortly before enjoyed, I heard it, "Pakistan's former Prime Minister, has been injured in a suicide attack. She is currently undergoing emergency surgery. Doctors have labeled her in serious condition." This woman, from my limited understanding of the political and social crisis in Pakistan, stood for democracy in a bullet-riddled, poverty-stricken country. But just days before their upcoming January 8th elections, she is gunned down and is then the victim of a suicide bomber, armed to the teeth with lead shrapnel and explosives. Unfortunately, I had to go in to work, so I couldn't hear the remainder of the story, but as I got in my car to head home tonight, having just cleared two inches of snow that had caked onto my windshield and wipers, the news hit me square in the chest, taking the breath from my lungs and bringing tears to my eyes. In tandem with the roar of my car engine, the newscaster stated, ".....after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in today's suicide attack....." So it had happened. She had died. The woman who campaigned among the people despite the obvious danger, who stood up for what she believed in at the risk of losing her life, the woman whose own father was hung for his beliefs, had died on an operating table somewhere in Pakistan with a bullet through her neck and shrapnel piercing her body.

The image of her broken body seared into my thoughts as I drove slowly through the clean white snow gliding past my windshield. I thought of what this meant for Pakistan. Would their elections go on? Would the retaliatory violence that had swept the country in the hours after her death subside or would the current President Pervez Musharraf declare a state of emergency, again returning the country to military rule? So much hangs in the balance, and there is no clear answer. Not even a second in command exists in Benazir Bhutto's party, she was it.

All down I-87, I listened as political consultants discussed the future, the upheaval that could be just around the corner, and the United States' response to the assassination. After all, we were one of the main reasons Bhutto returned to the country in the first place after her 8 years of exile. I listened with my mind on the larger picture, the picture of countries as borders on a map, of governments as collective wholes, as citizens grouped in the thousands and tens of thousands. And then it passed me. On the right, a larger black SUV with the label "Official Military Funeral Vehicle". That car fit one. One life ended, one family with a son or daughter lost to war- humanity's most enduring failure, one soul whose time on this planet was cut short. One. Not a government, not a nation, not a regime. One. One person. It could have been Benazir. Her family had just been given the same news. I am sorry, your wife is dead. She served her country heroically.

I don't know how to stop this suffering. I don't know how to live my life in the best and happiest way I can without forgetting that in another life, in another breath, a soul is expiring because of the hate and greed and ignorance that plagues this world. I don't know how to fix any of it. All I know is that my soul aches for the anguish of war, and it aches for my inability to see a solution. Could the answer be so simple as love? Could a phrase so cliche as, "All You Need is Love" really stop the venom of war from traveling deeper into our hearts? When I ask my my own heart this question, when I pray to my God for sight, it seems so simple. Love as much and as wholly as you possibly can. Combat pain with comfort, and fear with light. Fight sadness with all the joy you can muster. I cannot stop a war by myself. I can however, create a reason to end it.