When I started blogging all those years ago, it was to keep friends in far-flung places abreast of my flat renovation in Budapest. That was then.

Somewhere in the middle, when I split my main blog into three – one on travel, one on cemeteries, and the original, the likes and the comments became more important.

Now, though, it’s an exercise in processing and sharing.  I’m no longer bothered about the numbers. I’m no longer waiting to be discovered. I have a core group of readers who seem to enjoy and find inspiration in what I say. That’s enough.

Some blogs take hours; others take minutes. So much of what I learned, like FPA said, I learned by looking for something else.

There’s an anxiety about me. An unsettled dread. A deep-seated worry that the world as we know it is ending. Reading about the ‘anti-Israel’ protests in Glasgow and elsewhere along with the ‘pro-Palestine’ chants of From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, I worry. I use those annoying rabbit ears because I’m not at all convinced that those involved really understand what they’re doing. They may mean well… but do they understand? Really understand?

Or am I missing something?

No one wants kids to die, be they Israeli or Palestinian. I doubt there’s a ‘normal’ person in that part of the world who wants this war.

In an effort to understand the protests, the hatred, the venom, and what I’m increasingly seeing as short-sightedness, I started reading.

On Future of Jewish (because, let’s face it, no matter how this war is dressed up, that is what is at stake here), I came across a reference to US economist Thomas Sowell and his two visions – constrained and unconstrained.

Those with an unconstrained vision of the world believe

poverty, crime, inequality, and war are not inevitable; rather, they are puzzles that can be solved. We need only to stand up for the right causes, enact the right policies, and spend enough money in the right places in order to eradicate these social ills.

Those with an unconstrained vision don’t agree. For them

no amount of social engineering can change the sober reality of human self-interest, or the fact that human empathy and social resources are necessarily scarce. People who see the world this way believe that most political, social, and economic problems will never be “solved.” They can only be managed.

Not solutions. Trade-offs. Compromises.

I went looking for more on Sowell and found this excerpt from his book Dismantling America:

Moral preening from a safe distance; and at someone else’s expense.

There’s a thought.

This book published in 2010. That’s what he said then. This is what’s happening now.

This isn’t just about Israel or Palestine – it’s about the evil of Hamas.

Think about that.

Thanks, Thomas – you’ve explained something I was struggling to understand.