For Don, a meditation

I was looking for a topic for this column last week when it occurred to me that LI had been staring it in the face, in the news and in the Facebook feed that, like for many, my days begin and end with.

- JOSE DALISAY

It was the omnipresence of death, in its many forms and guises, swift and slow, painless and agonizing, arriving on whispery feet and crashing through one's roof or window.

"A screaming comes across the sky," the line with which Thomas Pynchon famously begins his novel Gravity's Rainbow, was how death and destruction came last week to hundreds in Kiev, Tehran and Tel Aviv, in missiles and drones designed and manufactured for but one purpose: to deliver death by inexact algorithm to place-names plotted on digital maps.

In India we marveled at the horror and the mystery of one survivor escaping a catastrophic plane crash barely a minute after take-off: a moment when most of us would have just begun to fidget with the entertainment controls, wondering whether to take in a comedy or a thriller for the next two hours and what the meal choices will be.

In Minnesota, a MAGA gunman stalked Democratic lawmakers and their families, shooting four and killing two on a long list of intended targets—murders that a Republican senator reflexively attributed to "Marxists not getting what they want."

Most appalling was the report of Israeli tanks firing into a crowd of Palestinians lining up for food in Gaza, an incident that led to about 60 deaths and more than 200 wounded, for which the Israelis apologized with this statement: "The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and operates to minimize harm as much as possible to them while maintaining the safety of our troops."