To the Editor:

I often think that one of our greatest pitfalls as human beings — individually as well as communally — is our failure of imagination.

This failure seems clearly operative as I try to understand how we continue to allow the slow slaughter of innocent children and their families to proceed in full view as we have in Gaza for the last 22 months, a genocide happening to a great extent on our dime.

Perhaps our imaginations need prodding.

So, imagine: Instead of on a tiny slip of land some 5,700 miles away, this decimation was happening locally — let’s say that an area that encompassed Clifton Park, Colonie, and the cities of Albany and Schenectady (about 141 square miles — the same size as the Gaza Strip) was blockaded and gated with highly fortified, militarized, totally controlled entrance and exit points.

We would also have to stretch our imagination to picture that, in addition to the approximately 388,700 people who live in this, our immediate neighborhood, there were an additional 1,800,000 or so others hemmed in.

Add to this picture the fact that in less than the two years past, 100,000 tons of ordinance had been dropped on and laid waste to this densely populated piece of land — this the equivalent of six Hiroshima bombs.

If we somehow could make our way into this off-limits  camp, we would discover that, as of this month, the constant bombardment had led to the deaths of at least over 60,000 of our neighbors (with many more unknown buried under rubble or in makeshift graves) and with masses more men, women, and children wounded and maimed. Reportedly, as many as 50,000 of these dead or injured are our neighbors’ children.

As we surveyed a once familiar landscape, we would discover that as of this month 92 percent of housing stock had  been seriously damaged or destroyed, ensuring that as of this past July, 90 percent of the population of our imagined Capital District enclave had been displaced, driven by need or edict, living in tents or inadequate communal shelters.

Of course, we must imagine that making our way around this previously oft and easily traveled region would be seriously compromised because key routes such as the Northway and routes 9 or 5 had been closed, made nearly impassable or become death traps, much as is the case with the two main arteries in Gaza.

With access to foodstuffs and medicine deliberately curtailed, with only 1.5 percent of the cropland left arable, with 89 percent of the water and sanitation systems destroyed or damaged, we would probably quickly understand why at least a million of our neighbors were experiencing famine conditions, why the life expectancy rate in less than two years had dropped as much as by 35 years.

Does such an exercise in imagining move us to truly understand the horrors of this untenable atrocity that we as a nation are helping to enable and pay for?

I can still remember the moment as a young teenager that I became aware of the Nazi Holocaust. The shock of this realization that such atrocities could be systematically perpetrated was palpably searing.

Quickly this shock gave way to these questions: Why hadn’t my parents who were alive while the unspeakable was occurring not told me; not been steeped in outrage; not done anything?

I fear because our imaginations have failed to engage adequately with the horror of this war, the consequences of all wars, all oppression, all inhumanity and because in so doing we continue as a nation, as a species to allow our treasure and ingenuity to be used to support and underpin hatred and retribution  rather than reconciliation and peaceful resolution, my grandchildren, our beloved next generations will ask: Why? When the horror was made clear right before our eyes — why?

Maureen Baillargeon Aumand

Latham, New York

Editor’s note: Maureen Baillargeon Aumand is a member of Women Against War and the co-coordinator of the annual Kateri Peace Conference whose 2025 focus is the current war in Palestine. She says all are welcome to attend the conference on Aug. 22 and 23 in Fonda, New York at the National Shrine and Historic Site of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha.