“The trouble with you, Henry, is that you have no strategy. Here I am, sitting quietly but alert, waiting in ambush for the wild turkeys that are marauding our birdfeeders, careful, very smart, patient, cunning—oooh, am I cunning. But then you just run out the dog door and yap yap yap, they’re all gone, and there goes my breakfast. You’ll never make it here.”

The usual back-and-forth between Aussie the patriot and Henry the Illegal Chihuahua takes place this morning. But today I don’t want to listen to any of it, though these canines sound so much saner than the humans in Washington.

How much sanity is there when our Secretary of Defense—sorry, of War—says that there is no clear evidence that Iran placed mines in the Straits of Hormuz, affecting the flow of oil throughout the world, and an hour later other American officials state that intelligence has clearly shown that Iran has begun to lay mines?

Or his characteristic quote: “Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it.” No need for all the ethical standards designed not to hurt civilians, even as modern warfare relies more and more on air-borne bombs and missiles that kill civilians rather than soldiers on the ground.

It’s been three hundred thousand years since homo sapiens appeared, and this is how we still talk? Our President and head of the Pentagon thumping their chests and making victory noises like some suited-up versions of an aggressive gorilla, while people who feel that war is not an answer except perhaps after all other options have been deployed, are woke, weak, liberal, weak-kneed, and setting the country up for failure?

The Dalai Lama has often been quoted as saying that if you want to be happy, do something for others. In my life, he’s proven to be right every single time. Religious texts urge us to be kind, charitable, or just do the right thing, but when one experiences the oneness of all creation, helping someone else is so obviously natural that it makes you feel good.

There’s the opposite scenario, when you feel unsafe, when you run into shelters or abandon your home, when you shake from fear of explosions both in the air and on the ground. Trauma affects us physically, including our DNA; I believe that violence of any kind, including not just war and destruction but also verbal violence and even repression of feelings (which is violence done unto ourselves), manifests in all our make-up, including the physical.

A dear friend, no longer here, spoke of her hurt grandchildren and said: “You just have to love and love and love, even when your heart breaks because you can’t do enough, because what you do won’t be enough, because you see that they’ll still get hurt and wounded and damaged, and what you do won’t be enough.”

We, too, are hurt and wounded and damaged. So are thousands of missiles the answer? More destroyers and jet fighters? More days of horror raining down from the heavens?

Day by day I practice widening my small capacity to love. And I don’t bother asking whether it’s enough.