Haifa and Beirut

We always see on CNN the devastation of Beirut, but we seldom see the other side.
Haifa, the city I live in, is a ghost city.Many people have died from Katusha attacks already, and most people, like my family and me, have fled the North. We found shelter at good hearted friends and family in the Tel-Aviv area.
The pictures show the devastation after the hit in the center of Haifa. Katusha is a rocket designed to kill people. The little holes were done by thousands of round bullets that surround the explosives in the rocket's head. Of course, this is forbidden by the Geneva's convention, but who cares. We only hear about the deteriorating humanitarian condition in Beirut, when almost exclusively the Hezbollah quarters were hit.
I'd like to ask to one of the crying mothers interviewed in Beirut's hospitals, if she had the power to go back in time and even decide a course of events:
1) No attack on Israeli civilians, no kidnap of Israeli soldiers, and no war at all, or
2) The current course of events with all the pain caused on both sides.
You'd be surprised by the answer.

The Meaning of Life

If you ask yourself such questions, you are probably a lucky member of the "satisfied class".
Not only your have your basic food, shelter and water needs met, but you have a more than average level of non-religious education. (Should you be materially satisfied but belong to a religious community, you wouldn't ask those questions but be taught the Only answer instead).
So you are not hungry nor thirsty. You're not cold nor wet. You have shoes, you own a book, and if you pray you don't do it with much conviction.
Now you start asking yourself what all that is for. What would the world be like if you weren't there. What if the world wasn't there.
Sooner or later you will turn to the profuse bibliography of bored pretentious people who were so convinced they held the true answer that they felt compelled to write it and illuminate you.
Probably the most popular of all theories (a real cliche) is that by helping others you get to know what the meaning of life is, which in the end is actually to help others.
I don't completely disagree with that.
Most likely, you will never know what the sense of life is.But deep inside you keep hoping that others can eventually find the truth, and by helping them to be happier and less burdened by penury of life, you'll feel a part of the achievement, and even be tinted by the final enlightenment.
If so, you will find much more comforting to help people with minor troubles rather than the poor unfortunate, sunk deep in the mud of necessity. For the seconds will never get out of the dirt and their sight will never rise to the sky. No matter how much you pull, they can feel the weight of life alleviated, but never take flight.
On the other hand, by helping the most privileged that are in need of a little push to get to the skies, you have more chances of sending them to their Karma and, maybe, get yourself to their heights too.
I got to think about all this while trying to understand billionaire philanthropists, those who donate their wealth to art museums instead of parachuting sacks of wheat over Africa.
The cereals would be digested and go away very quickly, if the process is not stopped short by the bullets of a warlord. But the unnecessary beauty of abstract art can perdure for generations, even forever if forever exists.
And this, who knows, could be the meaning of life.