Seeing as this is my second post, I would have liked to have used this as an opportunity to relate more about myself. However contemporary turn of events mean I feel compelled to write about an issue which has clearly captivated the world over the past few weeks

What is an occasion on the grand scheme of things but a fleeting moment? Yet there are so many which are well nigh catastrophic and seem to beckon humanity toward the brink of despair. Case in point: the war between Lebanon and Israel. Or to be exact, Israel's grudge match against everyone and everything. This is the political equivalent of a gangfight in a dark alley, an event where the thing one rival gang member said to the other is being avenged. Worst of all the mudslinging from both sides has caught up thousands of people who did nothing more wrong than live in the wrong apartment building.

This is one of those events which everyone loves to pontificate about, which side is in the more wrong, who's supporting whom; conspiracy theorists abound like sweat on a pig's back in midsummer, and of course everyone is quick to express their outrage over a real storm in a teacup situation. Many realise, but few consider, however, the absolute humanity of the situation. This is no doubt a senseless war, unleashed by an arrogant nation under a cowboy leader who rages over a lost penny under the slightest of provocations while perhaps maintaining a hidden agenda or two. It is all too easy to take sides with Lebanon at this point, or indeed with Israel, wherever your sentiments lie. It is astounding then that while we focus our attentions on the side we favour, we forget that on the other side are equal human beings, dragged into a conflict they knew nothing of, did not desire and could not prepare for. Even the soldiers, it is apparent, seem very reluctant and confused about the whole situation. This was clearly a war which nobody wanted, and as always is under situations of war, it is always the civilian population that sustains the hardest blows.

Today I was moved to tears seeing more news of Israeli soldiers dying, Lebanese people mutilated and cities being reduced to panic at the mere sight of overhead aircraft, while young men chanted support for Hizbollah in the streets. So much anger, so much hatred. One side against the other. Today reports confirmed the first death of an Australian in the conflict, a young Jewish soldier who left Sydney to enlist with the Israeli army. The news interviewed one of the rabbis of the Sydney synagogue, and he talked about the loss of a young man known throughout the Jewish community-famous for being a tight-knit and internally familiar one- as a quiet student and a star basketball player. I had never cried watching the news before, but as image after image of exploding buildings, fragmentised lives and angry youth it all became too much to bear. It just impacted me that in the torrent of the travailous news we hear every day we have become desensitised to the humanity that is individually lost. Here was a boy, a human being who but for his deeds was no less a human being than any other.

Cynics would say we are fated by the choices we make and we deserve the outcome of the situations we make for ourselves. The bare truth is no human life has ever deserved being lost in the circumstances of battle. There is no dignity in losing one's life, only in living it, and it is our deeds and actions that determine the loss of our dignity. As long as man fights man there will always be lives lost without fulfilled purpose. That in its sense is the proof that man will never stand beyond or over the standards of other common animals. We err out of our delusions, and it is our biggest delusion that we are in any way above and beyond the fundamental behavioural principles of nature, which will continue to lead us on the path to our downfall.