||| FROM THE INTERCEPT ||| posted at request of orcasonian reader

WARS, ASSASSINATIONS, COUPS — the perpetrators of violence confidently believe that the consequences will be discrete and limited to their own goals. They’ll kill their enemies, raise their arms in simian triumph, and that’s the end of the story. 

In reality, committing violence is like kicking a football covered in razors into history, where it lunges around, bouncing this way and that, slicing open random people across the world in a trajectory so complex that no human being can predict it.

This is frightening to think about, especially because there are thousands of these footballs caroming around the globe at any one time, occasionally smashing into each other and each then spiraling off in even more erratic directions.

But there’s good news. Standing up against the aggression of your own country or faction or “side” has effects that also travel in unpredictable waves across space and time, just more softly and quietly, without the exploding joint direct attack munitions. It often seems futile, but that’s an illusion: Just as no one can perceive the infinitely complex results of violence, no one can see the subtle effects of resisting violence. Both are equally real.

So if you’re considering participating in tomorrow’s demonstrations against the U.S.–Israeli assault on Gaza, I hope you will. You just have to make peace with the fact that you may never, ever know what you accomplished. The appalling reality is that you might not save the lives of any Palestinians. However, you will quite likely participate in saving someone’s life, even though you will never know who they are, and even though they will never know they’re alive because of you. This will even be the case if the person whose life you save is you.

HERE’S ONE PECULIAR story about how violence begets more violence, far beyond what its instigator intended, setting death zigging and zagging around the earth.

On July 3, 1988, the missile system supervisor on the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf pushed a button, firing two surface-to-air missiles toward Iran Air Flight 655. By doing this, he killed my high school biology lab partner Sam 181 days later, at 3:10 a.m. on December 31.

The Vincennes had been sent to the Persian Gulf to prevent attacks against oil tankers by either side during the Iran–Iraq War. Flight 655 was a civilian airliner with 290 people aboard, scheduled for a 28-minute trip from Iran across the Strait of Hormuz to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Thinking Flight 655 was a jet fighter attacking it, the Vincennes shot it down, killing all 290 people aboard. This was, depending on who you believe, either appalling recklessness or an innocent mistake anyone could make.

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