These are the days when we welcome the sun, perhaps because we need it more than ever; the kindled dream of Spring in store even when war is with us: far away in distant cites they are already mourning the dead and counting the cost of bombardment.

Is it ever enough, even at – or especially at – time like these, to seek some kind of antidote, some measure of a newfound warmth we can still find in our hearts even when the headlines tell another story?  Spring comes round consistent as the bulletins but of another calibre entirely, promises something that lifts us above what we all now have to face.  Can we take any measure at all from any of this, seek to find a way forward like navigating alleys of an ancient city – to find the way through, to be surprised at unexpected vistas?

We may be able to excavate some degree of consolation; not in that we’ve seen it before – those scars are too fresh – but in that we may find some kind of consistency of spirit, some constant of humanity, of the will to live and endure and do what we can to aid the suffering.

We can measure our way by the sunrise, by the knowledge that some things will always live on, that even when things seem at their most bleak there are amelioratives, that any tyranny can overplay its hand, that, even when they’ve barely finished mopping the Tehranian streets of the January blood the American people might look again at just who has led them to this latest bout of institutional insanity where instigators struggle to agree on even the reasons for engagement other than a kind of bloodlust for explosives, for rubbing in just who may be top dog when power seems to only understand or respond to an embodied threat from the very vestiges of mirror images.

That, for a time at least, we are all going to have to live with seemingly likely repercussions of this is a given.  For as long as it persists, a newfound flux of refugees, the peace of mind of those in the desert resorts and the repercussions for the prospects of tourism there, eye watering rises in fuel costs and energy bills, a hit on the global markets already struggling to right themselves to say nothing of what may happen if missiles begin to run out or the bitter attrition of those emboldened by blood-of-their-own being spilled in another round of tit-for-tat that, to saying nothing of the sorry toll of the actual casualties themselves, adds up to a brutal calculus: none of this comes as a particular surprise.  Was it ever too much to ask that somewhere, somehow, some kind of lessons might have been learned?

Two regimes then, face to face; disruptors, revolutionaries.  And what hopes for freedom beyond?  That this is, at best, a high stakes gamble and – in all likelihood – something more inchoate barely needs stating, like banging a drum on a march that needs no further addition.  Thank God then that, in this country at least we are not currently burdened with leaders indoctrinated with hues of Churchillian aspirations – the walking cliches blinding us to other circumstances than fascists on our borders even if fascists are sadly not thin on the ground – not so much reds under the bed as neo-nazis over the Pond.

Perhaps, when all of this has played out in the timeframe it takes, America; still counting the cost of historic invasions may come to a new reckoning of the men who have led them to this.  Perhaps they will see all the clearer their true calibre – not pundits for the people, not erstwhile drainers of any given institutional ‘swamp’ but brokers of a sought-for unparallelled power in all its terrible apparent might – bloodlusting, dizzy with its own top-heavy magnitude, serving no one but their own means and ends, ensconced in golden towers decked with gold, encrusted not with gems but with innocent blood and the bones of the future they currently stand to bequeath.

We are all of us better than this.  We all have it in us to rise above such a bitter inheritance.  That takes more than wishful thinking or harsh words.  But perhaps all the more of us will be able to see all the clearer the kinds of men currently running the show.

That Iran is a brutal regime there can be no doubt.  But neither can there be doubt regarding the risks and recklessness of Israel and America’s current ‘adventure’.  Wherever it leads we can perhaps take some succour from the thought that only the most wilfully blind will ever be happy to be led again by the kind of kabal now occupying the Whitehouse.  We can take some comfort that, beyond the touted drubbing of Maga in the mid-terms and come the next US election – as if in a puff of white smoke – they may be gone and America will be able to rise from its bonds, remembering the creeds of founding fathers, remembering what it can still mean to be part of the land of the free.