War

I just started reading a book of essays by Barbara Kingsolver called Small Wonder. She starts off the first essay with something real that seems impossible. A toddler is lost in Iran and is lost for so long that hope is just about drained dry...but they find the toddler in a cave being cared for by a bear. This bear is not only keeping this child warm but nursing this child also. Wow. Barbara Kingsolver:
"What does this mean? How is it possible that a huge, hungry bear would take a pitifully small, delicate human child to her breast rather than rip him into food? But she was a mammal, a mother. She was lactating, so she must have had young of her own somewhere-possibly killed, or dead of disease, so that she was driven by the pure chemistry of maternity to take this small, warm neonate to her belly and hold him there, gently. You could read this story and declare "impossible," even though many witnesses have sworn it's true. Or you could read this story and think of how warm lives are drawn to one another in cold places, think of the unconquerable force of a mother's love, the fact of the DNA code that we share in its great majority with other mammals-you could think of all that and say, Of course the bear nursed the baby. He was crying from hunger, she had milk. Small wonder."
How do we feel as mothers about war? What about the mothers in Iraq and Afghanistan and now Lebanon and Israel? How do we feel when we see footage of people running in the streets to escape an attack by the U.S.?
Kingsolver again:
"Maybe that's why I'm comforted by the image of a small child curled in the embrace of a mother bear. We need new bear and wolf tales for our times, since so many of our old ones seem to be doing us no good. Now we're finding that it takes our every effort of will and imagination to pull back, to stop in our tracks as hunter and hunted, to halt our habit of killing, before every kind of life we know arrives at the brink of extinction."

Just a little bit of information...this is my 100th post.