When the spirit moves you

Spirituality. For me, it ebbs and flows. I'm usually too caught up in the brick and mortar world to spend much time trying to get in touch with things spiritual. And lately, I've been feeling especially bereft, spiritually. Not long ago, this was different. I spent time each morning in meditation and prayer. I felt my connection to a higher power, a life source, God. Not lately. I guess I just work too much.

Finally taking some time to dig in the dirt of my garden this weekend, I felt reconnected with earth, always a good first step to connecting with the spiritual side of life. How can you observe all the amazing things of the natural world without feeling a connection to something so much bigger than yourself?

Then on Sunday, I met a man who seems to spend a great deal of his time in the spiritual plane. More work for me, though. I went to a press conference on the Sound in Wading River, held by a man who was starting a 35 day vigil to protest Broadwater. Well, protest isn't exactly the right word. His vigil is held to "invoke the spirit of nature," the spirit of the Sound, to stop Broadwater.

Now, protests I can relate to. Vigils to invoke the spirit of a body of water to rise up and stop a development project... Well, that's not something I understand very well.

I expected the guy to be a crackpot, if you want to know the truth. What I found when I met Pete Maniscalco at Wading River Creek Sunday afternoon was something else entirely. Sure, what he's doing is really sort of "out there" — but he is intelligent and thoughtful and a delight to speak with. (And quite a good interview.) He exudes an inner peace. I found myself wondering what it would be like to camp out on the Sound for more than a month, to spend all that time meditating, praying, communing with Mother Earth and the spirit of nature. I have a hard time sitting still and being quiet (without reading or writing) for more than five minutes.

So I asked him to blog about his experience for our papers. After explaining to him that a blog is sort of an online journal, he readily agreed to do it. He'd planned to keep a journal anyway, he said. So every day at around 5 p.m. for the next month, Pete is going to phone in his blog entry to me, and I am going to type what he dictates and post it on a blog I've created for him, which I called Pete's Broadwater Vigil.

To learn more about Pete and his vigil, read one of Times/Review's papers this week. And please do check out his blog, and post your own comments about what he's doing, feeling and thinking about. I think this could be a very interesting community dialogue about an extremely important subject.

Flying a flag of remembrance

Memorial Day. As a kid, war seemed long ago and far away. World War II and Korea were ancient history for me, born in the late 1950s. Then the tumult of Vietnam swept the country. The older brothers of my peers got drafted and sent to the jungles of Southeast Asia. The death and destruction there was distant, detached. And Vietnam, for me and so many young people of that era, was all about resistance. Resisting the draft, resisting the yoke our parents' generation put on us to fight a war that made no sense, resisting "the establishment."

Honoring our war dead at that time did not occur to many people my age. The men who donned a military uniform and went off to fight in Vietnam, the 58,000 of them who were killed there — they deserved pity, perhaps, for being exploited that way. But honor? My generation was too caught up in the frenzy of protest to even consider honoring those men and women who lost their lives in that awful war.

Vietnam so complicated things for young people of the 1970s. Our parents and grandparents fought wars that mattered. Our nation seemed much more clearly on the side of what was right back then. Vietnam, on the other hand, was pointless — fighting to preserve the rule of one horrible dictator versus another, protecting Southeast Asia from the spread of communism, and thereby protecting democracy throughout the world. The threat didn't seem real. The arguments shallow. And our government lied. Repeatedly. Tens of thousands died. For what? The distrust for government bred in my heart during those formative years of my life remains with me to this day.

So I was never one to observe Memorial Day. It seemed somehow a celebration of war. I couldn't separate honoring the soldiers who gave their lives from honoring the war that claimed them. And war, the war I knew (albeit, gratefully, from afar) was no cause for honor.

War is nothing to celebrate. War rarely accomplishes anything. War breeds more hatred, more violence, more war. More destruction and death.

There are loud echoes of Vietnam in Iraq: wars fought under false pretenses, government leaders lying, the true purpose of battle, and its efficacy, justifiably questioned.

But those of us opposed to the present war should not make the same mistakes we made during Vietnam. We must not get the matter of honoring the men and women who sacrificed their lives in this war tangled up in our opposition to it. They answered a call — whether patriotic or economic. They put on a uniform. They went into battle in service to their country, and died. Honoring that sacrifice is not the same as honoring the war that claimed them, or honoring the war's purpose, or its perpetrators.

When I fly the flag on Monday, it won't be an expression of support for the war in Iraq, or solidarity with the administration's purpose or plan for this ill-conceived battle. It will be to remember, acknowledge and respect the lives cut short — all lives — by the insanity of war — all wars. It will be an expression of grief, not glory. It will be flown in the hope that by remembering, truly remembering, the real costs of war, we will diminish the opportunity for war in the future.

E-mails to denise@timesreview.com.

That we should never forget

Marion Blumenthal Lazan's hazel eyes sparkle with pride as she flips through the pages of the small photo album she carries in her purse, showing off her children and grandchildren to teachers and students at a luncheon in her honor at Rocky Point Middle School Monday.

The petite and vivacious, well-dressed woman from Hewlett could be anybody's modern-day bubbe. (For all you goyim out there, that's grandma in Yiddish.) She identifies her three grown children by what they do and where they live. She kvells — beams with pride and pleasure — over the images of her nine grandchildren. Her index finger touches each face as she says each name aloud, a broad smile on her face. My mother used to do the same thing with pictures of her grandkids.

But Ms. Lazan's pride takes on special meaning when you think about how the smiling, attractive people in the snapshots filling the pages of this grandma's brag book were almost never born.

Ms. Lazan, a German-born Jew, spent more than six of her first 11 years of life in the Westerbork refugee camp and the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She and her family were on their way to a death camp, packed into a cattle car with 2,500 other prisoners for two weeks, facing certain extermination at the end of their journey, when an allied invasion ended their trip and ended the war.

She had nearly starved to death, weighing only 35 pounds when Russian soldiers liberated the surviving occupants of that death train, on April 23, 1945. One in five had perished on the way. Marion and her family were among the fortunate to have escaped with their lives, though barely. And her father died six weeks later of typhus contracted at Bergen-Belsen.

The nightmare she lived as a child still haunts her, 60 years later. She recalls in vivid, explicit detail the horrors suffered at the hands of the Nazis: being slowly starved to death, being beaten, terrorized by vicious German shepherd police dogs. The lice that infested her hair and clothes and spread disease and death among the prisoners. The straw mattress on a narrow wooden bunk that served as living quarters for two in an unheated wooden barracks, with one thin blanket to share between them. Standing in assembly for hours on end, while Nazi soldiers conducted head counts of their prisoners, with little to wear and nothing to shield her from the weather. The frostbite she suffered as a result. Prisoners trying to warm their hands with their own urine. Having nothing to occupy her mind but fear, nothing to play with but dirt and pebbles — and lice. The sights and sounds and odors that no little child should have to see or hear or smell. The utterly unspeakable.

And yet, Marion Blumenthal Lazan speaks. She has to. Driven by a passion that the world must never forget how six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, Ms. Lazan speaks. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to recount the details of her imprisonment repeatedly as she travels the country with her doting husband, Nathaniel, speaking to schoolchildren, as she did at two assemblies of middle and high school pupils in Rocky Point Monday.

"I detach," she told me. "That's the only way I can do it. So it's as if I'm talking about a bad dream I had, rather than something that I actually lived through."

But Ms. Lazan's mission extends beyond making sure the Holocaust is not forgotten by future generations. Hers is a mission to make children understand the logical consequences of unbridled bigotry. The details of her ordeal are interspersed with words of wisdom: Be kind, be gentle, be tolerant. Accept others' differences, even celebrate them. Never judge a large group of people by the actions of a few of them. Don't generalize. Don't ever, ever follow anyone blindly. No one.

Quietly, but firmly, she teaches us how history repeats itself, relating current events to the lessons of the Holocaust. Religious fundamentalists, terrorists, Sept. 11, ethnic "cleansing," genocide in Darfur. All the violence in the world that's fueled by hatred, bigotry and intolerance.

Of course, I can't do justice to the compelling message carried by this 73-year-old Holocaust survivor to the children of Rocky Point this week. But I can tell you it is a message those kids heard loud and clear. They were riveted in their seats. You could hear a pin drop in the auditorium, though it was filled with 750 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders. Nearly every student's hand shot up when Ms. Lazan asked for questions at the conclusion of her talk. They didn't want to leave the auditorium; a large group surrounded her onstage, where she spoke with students one-on-one, and freely dispensed warm, loving hugs to each of them.

Ms. Lazan's courage, spirit and determination, her zest for life, her love for humanity and her message of respect and tolerance made an indelible impression on the young hearts and minds of Rocky Point students this week. Her living history lesson will be remembered by those she touched forever.

What price silence?

Tomorrow morning before dawn, three busloads of people from the North Fork will depart Riverhead for Washington, D.C. to attend a march for peace. I will be one of them.

The trip from the North Fork is being organized by North Fork People of Conscience. The group has been surprised by the response. Originally planning one bus, they hired a second when the first filled up in just a day. Now they've got three going.

People from every state in the union will be attending the rally and march, whose purpose is to send a message to Congress that American involvement in the war in Iraq must end.

It's been a very long time since I participated in any kind of a demonstration. The last time was, I think, at the U.N., in the early 1980s. I feel foolish to admit that I can't quite remember what it was about. El Salvador, I think. The debacle in the Middle East has inspired me. What a terrible mess. With no easy solutions. Perhaps no solutions at all. It's really very depressing. Hundreds of thousands of lives lost, a country in ruins, America disgraced. Our troops being used as pawns, not only in military warfare in an Iraqi civil war, but in political warfare at home. But, boy, does this sound familiar, as I'm old enough to remember Vietnam. Such a similar scenario. Except this one is actually far more dangerous, because of the powder keg that is the Middle East, and the potential for mass destruction.

Another 20,000 troops? Is that the answer? Not likely. As one of al-Qaeda's top commanders said this week, echoing the arrogant bravado of our own leader a few years back, "bring 'em on." He said we could send the whole army. It wouldn't matter. I think we should heed his warning. There are millions of people there who hate each other, but hate America even more. There is no "winning" this war. Bush, like Nixon decades ago, is casting "victory" as a matter of "honor," characterizing "supporting our troops" as supporting his war, painting people opposition to his war as unpatriotic.

Will this march accomplish anything? Who knows? But I feel compelled to attend, to stand up and join the chorus of Americans in protesting this administration's failed foreign policy and disastrous military initiatives in the Middle East. I can't, in good conscience, remain silent.