On every Social Media and news site I am bombarded with stories about college students rising up against the violence in the Middle East, specifically the innocent people in Gaza caught up in a war between Hamas terrorists and Israeli Defense Forces. There are fights breaking out on US soil over the fighting in the Middle East.

Those who track such things say that Anti-Semitism is on the rise. Hardly surprising given that a certain political party has emboldened all sorts of hate groups over the past decade. Who can forget them marching in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us”?

Hate period is on the rise, thanks MAGA for nothing.

But back to this issue with college students and the uprisings we are seeing across the nation. Their behavior feeds into a conservative narrative that being educated is an awful thing. Thinking is to be avoided at all costs. Thus, Republicans ban books by the dozens and deride thinking as “elitist” while they frame their Ivy League diplomas in shimmering gold to display prominently.

It’s easy to point to these college students and declare them Anti-Semitic, which indeed, some are. Perhaps many. I don’t know them personally so I can’t say what motivates them. I have never understood such hatred, thankfully. It was easier for me to grasp racism given I grew up in Georgia and encountered it daily. It was easier for me to understand Homophobia since I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church. But the Jews? They were God’s chosen. Why would anyone hate them, especially after all they’ve been through?

Still, I know people do. I’ve read the books, watched the movies, seen the group of flag-waving Nazis standing at the overpasses along Florida’s highways and outside Florida’s synagogues. (Note that the common denominator here is Florida, and a governor who has encouraged this sort of thing.)

But these college students taking to the streets, waving the flags of Palestinians, calling for a cease-fire from Netanyahu? They remind me of another group of college students and dropouts from decades ago.

I was young then, just a young girl who liked to read gothic novels about ghosts wandering the halls of English manor houses. I understood what war does to a family but I had no concept about the politics behind such wars. I didn’t know then how wars were tied to US policy or US Defense Contractors. I understood nothing about how wars help economies, or that by ginning up the emotions of the masses, politicians could exploit voters for their own selfish ambitions.

All I really understood about war was how much I missed my father and how his death had thrust our family into a level of poverty both physically and spiritually that rendered me afraid for decades to come. That kind of fear, the one that alters a young child’s world, robs that child of a parent or both parents, and grandparents and the comforts of home, that takes a lifetime to heal from, if ever. I can’t imagine the nightmares that ensue when a child has seen monsters come into their own home and turned it into a house of horrors, the way Hamas did to the Israelis. Is it possible to ever recover from that? To ever feel safe again?

And what about the child who survived the incessant bombing that came following the Hamas attacks? I’ve seen the videos of the babies in shock, unable to speak, or crying relentlessly and hopelessly for their dead mother or father. That Palestinian girl who fell to the ground crying for her dead parents, that’s a grief I do understand. It’s a grief I’ve lived.

It was a similiar slaughter scene from decades ago that propelled the grandfathers and grandmothers of today’s generations to flood the streets demanding an end to America’s War in Vietnam.

News was slower then. We didn’t have immediate access to videos out of the countrysides of Vietnam. News was regulated; corporates controlled the news, controlled what people saw and heard here on US soil. But when those photos from the My Lai Massacre hit the front pages of newspapers around the country, the masses rose up in protest.

I suppose there were some Americans then who shrugged their shoulders and figured, “Well, that’s the cost of war: Dead children.” Certainly in my hometown, next to a military base, the very military base that would eventually hold the trials for the people who ordered such a massacre, defended those soldiers actions.

There is nothing just about war. Nothing righteous. Nothing good. My friend David, who has served in many wars and who grew up in a war-plagued country says, “When two elephants fight the grass gets trampled.” Right now the people of Palestine are getting trampled as Israelis seek to destroy Hamas who seeks to destroy them.

And here, in the US, we have a front row seat to the massacres that are taking place, perpetuated by Hamas and Israelis. And just as decades ago, when the grandmothers and grandfathers of today’s generations flooded the streets in protest over America’s War in Vietnam, those who are horrified by what is happening now are taking to the streets again.

Unfortunately, they are making some of the same mistakes that the grandmothers and grandfathers from the 1960s made. Back then, protestors turned on America’s soldiers. Soliders, often drafted, returned home to be villified by the very same public that had allowed their Congress to send them to war to begin with. Even the family members of soldiers suffered. So great was the animonsity toward the American soldier because of what had happened at My Lai, all those children and their mothers slaughtered, mowed down, under the orders of higher ranking soldiers. It was awful. All of it. The dead children in culverts, running from the soliders. The old grandpapas and grandmommas trying to stop the massacre, mamas trying to shield their babies, dead. All of them. Looking at those photos, it is easy to see why protestors took to the streets demanding an end to the war.

Just as it is easy to see now, why college students and others are marching and protesting on behalf of the genocide taking place in Palestine today.

We should all be in the streets demanding a ceasefire and humanitarian aid for those caught up in a war they didn’t start, didn’t want and who are suffering the most because of it.

But what none of us should be doing is villifying Jews in the process. The average Israeli Defense Force, like the average American solider from the Vietnam era, is only following orders. You want to be angry at someone, take it out on Hamas. Or Netanyahu, whose only response to terror is more terror, to slaughter is more slaughter.

I’m not saying don’t protest. I urge each and every voter who pays taxes to get off your ass and call your legislator and demand a cease-fire. Demand a halt to the slaughter. Demand that not one red cent be used to line the pockets of corporates who benefit the most from war. Remember it’s our weapons that IDF are employing to destroy Gaza.

That aid package that the GOP just came up with? It’s money from taxpayers that will go to help Israel buy more munitions from American companies, thus, pouring the money back into the pockets of already wealthy men who then contribute to the GOP.

As the Good Book says, “When I was a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I picked up my gun.”

Oh, wait. That’s not it.

How about “When I was a child I thought as a child but as an adult I learned to connect the dots and realized all wars lead back to money and power.”

I’d pray for the children of Palestine and Israel but living here in the US I’ve seen first-hand how thoughts and prayers fail to keep America’s children safe. It’s only government policy that can protect any of them.