We don't want to learn, why?

I have switched off my computer for a moment to rest. The huge window from the room where I am sitting shows me a marvellous sunset. As incredible as those of my homeland in La Mancha, although different. Another light, another environment, maybe even another look. I am far from home, from my friends, from my world. 

The sun is a perfect ball painted in red that diminishes in intensity as it begins to hide among the palm trees. In the distance, for a few seconds, the adhan or call to prayer is heard. The muezzin recites as I imagine him on the minaret of a nearby mosque. I pray quietly too. 

The silence, the stillness of the moment, seems to turn this image into a painting. There is so much beauty enclosed in this instant! It is easy to isolate oneself from everything, from noise, from circumstances, from one's own life. To think that you are walking along the waters of a calm river, that you can hear the murmur of the sea, that the wind is whispering a sweet melody while that red circle begins to hide like a shy child at a birthday party.  

Minutes of contemplation, alien to existence; close to this other reality that eclipses the one that worries us most. 

The sunset is going down to give way to the beginning of the darkness of the night. Dark, like the international moment we live in. I imagine the map and I feel like crying like a little girl with her broken doll, like so many little ones who suffer the most miserable of decisions: war. And, once again, it hurts. The pain of so many hurts. It hurts the anger, the revenge, the not learning, the not wanting to do it. 

No, we don't learn. We don't want to learn, why? 

We repeat history. And this 21st century is beginning to look too much like the first half of the last century that brought so much evil. We stumble over the same stones, and instead of removing them, we leave them again on the road where we will pass again, others will return. Falling, now, does not mean getting up and moving forward. Falling is destruction. To fall is death. 

We sow to reap hatred and revenge. Either you are here or you are there. The voices of one or the other, their convincing reasons to act, their diverse messages, their past histories, their truths and lies, their guilt and innocence, their eternal rivalries... they stick like freshly sharpened knives without leaving the ability to save themselves, to breathe. 

We are puppets whose strings are pulled by only a few. Dolls that fall, that break, burn, disappear... Puppets that perform on a stage before the impotence and desolation of the audience.  

Hamas is a terrorist organisation that has killed more than 250 people and is holding another 220 hostage. We do not forget, how can we forget the beginning of this new atrocity? But Palestinians are not terrorists, let alone children. The images of these little ones in arms wrapped in white sheets to be buried oppress the soul. Children dead, more than 2,000, orphaned, abandoned, lost... Also women, young people, innocent civilians. 

The great ones argue in offices. The most vulnerable are left forgotten in the rubble, wandering the streets in search of a way out. The kidnapped tremble as they count the hours, the days, while they live with horror, fear and uncertainty. Many were enjoying a concert for peace. How ironic life is. Is it too much to ask for sanity, dialogue, peace? I know it is. 

I wonder what it means to win a war. Hearts broken into a thousand pieces never mend. It doesn't matter where they were broken, whether on the side that won or on the side that lost. 

Tomorrow, from my window, I will see another beautiful sunset... and the wars will go on.