6 april 2012, still crazy after all these years

I was so struck by bosnia, by such carnage, in such sophistication, in the middle of europe. And so very close to me, across the hungarian border whose capital I was living in at the time (see 26 may 2011). Still today, I can't work out the degree to which it was caused by religion, and how much religion was pressed to the cause. In a city known across the continent for its tolerant, secular population, neighbours seemingly suddenly drew lines in the road they literally defended with their lives. To see first world war trenches, holocaust imagery, african child soldiers, israelis in uniform, all somehow speaks of war to my particular cultural programming, but to see men shooting out of the windows of well to do houses, with family photographs on the walls, somehow seems stranger and that it ought to have been easier to stop it happening. I do remember seeing the serbian soldiers start shelling sarajevo from the very spot where just a few years before the winter olympics has been taking place. All war is madness, but this seemed especially so. After a traditionalish religious childhood, and an early adulthood much less so, the wheel has begun to turn again as our kids make their way through school, and as a family we have welcomed the culture into our lives, although on our own terms. As an arch modernist and secularist, it is a strange internal discourse, and sometimes uncomfortable for someone so usually sure in their views. Not an unpleasant situation though, on the contrary on days like today as we prepare for our seder, amongst my very strongest and best childhood memories. I am making more for my own children, and I am strangely and incredibly happy about that.