Some wars are worth fighting. However, when you take stock and realize you’ve lost 26 members of your family, maybe it’s time to surrender and retreat.

Last night, I watched a PBS special that tried to explain war in the Middle East, specifically the conflicting ideologies of Iran and Saudi Arabia and how it’s affecting countries like Syria and Yemen. And they tried to do it in 3 hours. 3 hundred years wouldn’t be enough time to go through everything that has happened in a conflict that has spanned millennia and I am not trying to simplify their problems or even suggest that I have solutions.  Everyone who knows me knows I am such a non-confrontational pacifist, I don’t even like to watch boxing as a sport so battle strategy isn’t really my area of expertise. And I don’t want to trivialize the wars or their reasons for engaging in them. But perhaps when 80 percent of your country is destroyed, when most of your children are under- or malnourished or deformed, or maybe when you wake up to half a million civilians dead, when most of your women are living as widows, in camps, raising children who would not have had any idea how to live as anything other than refugees, maybe then those reasons don’t matter anymore and the war that was worth fighting is better ended. Eventually, someone will lose. Do you have to lose everything before you realize that’s you?