A couple of weeks ago when we had the unseasonably warm weather my dog and I were walking in the park. We passed a young couple kissing on one of the benches. ("In France they kiss on Main Street. Amour, mama, not cheap display," sang Joni Mitchell when I was young.) I thought about how if they were Palestinian young people either one of them might strap on dynamite and blow him or herself up at a crowded bus stop in an Israeli section of town. Or they might be young Israeli soldiers who would go out to retaliate the next day. Meanwhile, I kept thinking, if they were in a Buddhist country, even one under siege, they might find it in themselves not to want to add to the suffering in the world by returning violence for violence received and endured.

I can get my mind around being young and in love, kissing on a park bench. I can let my mind wander back to my youth when I had a good deal more clarity than I do now about injustice and the absolute necessity of fighting against it, even if doing so meant going to jail. I cannot get my mind around being -- and I'm not sure I even have the right to speculate here -- filled with such hopelessness about the future of my people that I take to heart martyr-talk and willingly blow myself up. I can, however, see myself feeling like the existence of my people has been so besieged for millennia that we can trust no response but military destruction.

I also think that older adults can exploit young people's emotional intensity. How often have teenagers beaten up a "nigger" or a "faggot" because their parents wound them up with hate speech? And the young patriot enlistee doesn't think that there might be a bullet with his name on it.

There is nothing more ordinary, or more of a sign of life begetting life than a young couple kissing on a park bench. They are our future and they deserve to have a future life waiting to receive their diverse gifts. The world is in a mess, much of it of our own making. From intractable conflicts to destruction of the earth itself, so many things cry out for our sane, compassionate attention. Ensconced in middle age as I am, I feel in myself the temptation to think that the young people will have to solve these problems. But that's neither right nor fair. We who have already inherited the world need to keep working to find better ways than violence to solve conflicts and better ways than squandering to manage the bounty of the earth.

I hope that we Unitarian Universalists can give one another courage and heart to keep working to make the world whole. We have been given so much and have so much to give back.

See you in church! Ann