“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” There is some dispute about the source of this quote. Some people attribute it to Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke. Others ascribe it to English writer and Anglican cleric Rev. Sydney Smith. Either way, I consider those words to be some of the wisest ever spoken by man.

The charge embedded in that quote is one that most of us are guilty of. The world we inhabit today is a vast ocean of misery. Unlike the all-conquering giant waves that people who travel across seas often encounter, the extensive array of mountain-size problems that humanity faces now are mostly man-made. They usually begin as molehills. It is due to our collective inattention and inaction that they end up becoming unscalable massifs.

When faced with any problem that seems too big for any individual or a small group of people to deal with, our natural response is to recoil into our shells. We huddle around family and close friends. And then we hope that whatever that overwhelming monster happens to be, it is far enough away that we won’t get tangled up in its clutches. But the perils are never as distant as we like to think. Most of the time, we are kept safe from them only because of pure luck. As should be obvious to everyone, such reliance on providence for protection is quite a dangerous way to live.

I am one of the ever-shrinking pool of people who still get some of their news from television. My two favorite news broadcasts these days are PBS News Hour and BBC World News America. I watch them religiously because of the in-depth nature of their coverage of world affairs. Correspondents from those outlets risk their lives to travel to some of the most dangerous conflict zones to report on the horror and atrocities that are sometimes impossible to look away from. Such exposure is often what forces the global community to take action. The sad reality though is that despite the selfless contributions of these courageous reporters, we have all become so desensitized by the sheer number and scale of the conflagrations that the feeling of powerlessness has taken over.

The Israel-Hamas war that erupted after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel is one such inferno. For the past fifteen months, tens of thousands of innocent people, mostly Palestinians, have been swept into it. The world’s attention was rightly fixated on the conflict during its first year, but as the death and destruction has gone from one unimaginable level to another, ennui has inevitably set in.

I must admit that I have suffered from this helplessness, and perhaps would have withdrawn my attention somewhat from this war, both emotionally and mentally. The underlying Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been so intractable for so long that practically, there is nothing that an ordinary person like me can do to influence it in any meaningful way. And if that is the case, why spend energy on it? The answer to that question came to me from two stories I heard on television not long ago.

The first was about a Palestinian man whose wife, a doctor, had just given birth to twins. He had gone to a local government office in Gaza to obtain birth certificates for the children. Shortly after he left, an Israeli airstrike leveled the home in which he and his family lived. He returned to find nothing but rubble. His wife and two newborns were dead.

I cannot find the words to describe his state of horror upon learning the news so I will leave that to the imagination of the reader, especially anyone who is a parent or grandparent. The man collapsed to the ground and was inconsolable. According to the newsreader, the completely shattered husband and father was going to have to return to the office, which he had visited just minutes earlier, to apply for death certificates for his wife and newborn twins. As I sat motionless staring blankly at the television screen, one question flashed through my mind: What kind of “life” is this man supposed to live after that?

A few weeks after hearing that story, I watched another one on television, this time of an Israeli father who hid with his family in the safe room of their home as Hamas militants went on the rampage through their kibbutz on that October morning in 2023. The attackers entered the house and furiously tried to break into the safe room. After a few minutes, it became clear to the family that they were in mortal danger. The man’s fourteen-year-old son had a premonition that he would die. An avid skateboarder, he told his father to bury him with his skateboard. My mind instantly turned to my son. I pictured myself in that situation having to listen to those instructions from him. I was sick to my stomach.

The boy was killed, as he feared. His coffin was shown with his skateboard on top of it as it was lowered into the grave. It was one of the most gut-wrenching pictures I have ever seen on a television screen. His father, who was interviewed for the story, was gravely wounded in the attack and had one of his legs amputated, leaving him wearing a prosthetic leg. Once again, I asked myself how this father is supposed to carry on with life after such an ordeal.

Every single one of the nearly fifty thousand deaths thus far in this war are as tragic as those in these two stories. In each case, there is a mother, father, sibling and some other close relative whose life has been permanently broken to pieces. It shouldn’t matter whether the victims, dead or alive, are Palestinians or Israelis. They are people like any one of us.

Because calamity can befall anyone anywhere in a split-second these days, it is in everyone’s interest to make sure that we are all working to create a world that is as safe as it can possibly be. The task may be daunting, but because the problems underlying all these conflicts were created by humans, it is humans who need to solve them. And we should never underestimate how consequential our individual actions can be. In the seemingly endless war on terror that the entire world is fighting nowadays, we have been asked repeatedly by authorities to say something if we see something. That is clear recognition that ordinary people can help bring about safety for all in extraordinarily meaningful ways.

I write quite a bit these days because it is my way of saying something about the things I see as problematic. The thoughts I express are my humble opinions. Some of them will probably be wide off the mark. I am always prepared to acknowledge and correct any factual errors I make, and will readily apologize when some statement of mine offends someone or some people. But I will not let those fears discourage me from sharing what is on my mind. It is far better to be wrong than silent.