Guest Blogger Wendy Baez -- Author of "Catch a Dream"
Is peace possible without forgiveness? by Wendy Brown-Baez / wbrownbaez@yahoo.com “Clambering down from the ramparts, we find ourselves behind three young soldiers. They hug the walls, sliding warily past the sealed doors of striking shops. One of them has a large bandage around his head where a rock has fallen from a roof-top, probably thrown by a child. They keep to the protection of small awnings, balconies that jut into the twisting shadowed streets. Walking behind them, we feel the urge to run, to escape, we are silent and our nerves are on fire.…These young soldiers doing their duty, on guard for their very lives, are the same young men who will later sit in a pub, drink a beer, tell jokes, laugh, flirt with a girl walking by, make plans for the future: a wife, a family, a home, some decent job, to breath freely, to pray or not to pray, just as they choose, to be men. Or die in a war they did not ask for, they do not want. Or kill some teen-ager or child in a spray of r