Olden Days

 I was in the sixth grade during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. That fall we had a student teacher in our class whose name was Jeff Franklin. It was his special project to have all of us kids do some research into the events happening in the Middle East. We read newspapers. We read magazines. We watched TV news for extra credit. And as a culmination of sorts, we were told we were going to interview key figures in the conflict. All of them were played by Mister Franklin. 

The first thing that occurs to me was that I was going to school in the liberal bastion of Boulder, Colorado. There was no ruckus stirred by having sixth graders investigating the how and the why of a war on the other side of the world. Parents didn't mind. Administrators didn't mind. The kids, myself included, were having the time of our young lives. Learning. Discovering. 

We learned about OPEC. We learned about things in that region so far away from us affected us all back home. People were fighting and dying over tiny strips of land. Tiny strips of land that just happened to be sitting on top of some of the planet's largest oil reserves. They weren't fighting over the oil. They were fighting over the same strips of land that they had been fighting over for thousands of years. 

Which is why I am not shocked that the conflict continued into this past weekend when Israel declared war on Hamas after a surprise attack left more than a thousand dead and thousands more wounded. I don't know if any sixth graders will be taking up the study of the war in the Middle East. I do not know if there is anything else to learn.

Quick note: Gas prices during the "Oil Crisis" of 1973 - the unbelievable fifty-three cents a gallon. Currently in the United States a gallon of gas costs just under four dollars. So, I guess some things really do change.