One of the things I love about living in greater Boston is the inescapability of history. It’s a large part of what kept me here despite the temptations of New York, near which I grew up, or San Francisco, my wife’s home city—not to mention the lure of such singular oases as New Orleans, Santa Cruz, Santa Fe and Boulder. There is something moving about living around the corner from where Lydia Maria Francis Child, the great abolitionist, novelist, and best-selling author of The Frugal Housewife, was born. It was to Child’s grandfather’s house that the horse knew “the way/to carry the sleigh/through the white and drifting snow”—or so claimed the song based on her poem which we sang in elementary school. An ardent advocate for human rights (which included the rights of women), she published Hobomok, New England’s first historical novel, about a white woman who marries a Native American, at the age of twenty-two. Her book, “An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans,” was one of, if not the first, book demanding an end to slavery and discrimination to be published in the US. Child was rewarded for her courage by seeing her work go out of print. Juvenile Miscellany, her children’s magazine, was forced to fold. She was vilified by the literary establishment, shunned in the street by her fellow citizens, and subjected to mob violence. A building housing a Chinese restaurant and a massage parlor now stands on the site of her birthplace. The inescapability of the past, yes. But also, the changes wrought by that succession of presents of which the past is composed.

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And as to continuity?

Just how deep is my love? Would I be willing to die defending this place? Could I imagine killing to protect it?

Our local history is shadowed from the start by the archetypal American darkness. The stain of slavery and exploitation via the sugar and rum trade played an important part in Medford’s early economy. “Jingle Bells” was composed here, and it’s home to the last free-standing slave quarters still standing north of the Mason-Dixon line.

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Part of what I love about my adopted city is its neighborly spirit, evident in the mini “food pantries” that have sprouted every few blocks, often adjacent to mini “free libraries.” Both are housed in simple wooden boxes, usually painted in brash colors, with glass doors, and affixed to wooden posts. People deposit food for the body or nourishment for the soul free for the taking.

Love is not a sentiment I remember feeling for other places I’ve lived, and the realization that I feel it now raises a question I’ve never considered before. Just how deep is my love? Would I be willing to die defending this place? Could I imagine killing to protect it? My daily walks can’t help reminding me of the many who did just that, decades and centuries ago. It’s partly thanks to them my wife and I have enjoyed our quiet lives here for the last thirty years.

That I would even ask such a question startles me. Having grown up listening to stories that underscored the limitless horrors of war, and inside the framework of Catholicism, I took the injunction “Thou shalt not kill” sincerely to heart. I became, so I believed, a pacifist. Moreover, some thirty years of studying Buddhism reinforced the importance of self-restraint, of taming one’s angers, of attempting to return good for evil.

So: would I die, and perhaps more challenging, would I kill, to defend Medford from an occupying force? At one level, the question is absurd. After all, who’s going to invade the world’s strongest nuclear power? Canada? Mexico? Russia?

Yet the question surfaces, prompted by the violence endemic to our present moment—and perhaps to all times in human history.

It’s not just the war in Ukraine that’s set me wondering. A story in Newsweek published in December 2023 suggested that only 19% of Germany’s citizens would be ready to defend their homeland against an invasion. Less than 5% said they’d enlist voluntarily. Over 25% said they’d emigrate. The majority of those who said they’d stay and fight were from either the extreme right or the Green Party.

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A young writer recently showed me a story in which she devotes her first two pages to describing, in such vivid detail that it feels like slow motion, a muscle car roaring down the street and flattening a bunny. The driver races on without ever registering the roadkill.

It struck me that that’s what it must be like for pilots flying MiGs, Sukhoi, Skyhawks, Phantoms, or F-16s as they dump their “payloads” on the barely visible specks scurrying thousands of feet below and zoom off, flattening entire buildings or even city blocks, without ever knowing how many people they killed.

A cursory search online for an answer to the question Do you feel guilty for dropping bombs on innocent civilians? reveals surprisingly glib and anodyne responses, ranging from claims that no one wants to harm innocents, but, alas, war is war, to outright admissions that without seeing the consequences of their actions, pilots and drone operators feel little sense of responsibility for what happens after they’d done their jobs.

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When I imagine fighting to defend family and friends, I picture a face-off, direct combat. But postmodern warfare is largely anonymous, a matter of drones and missiles, falling on strangers, missing their targets, and killing whole families of non-combatants. Shouldn’t that be factored into my grim fantasy?

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Can someone born to stability possibly understand what it’s like to experience a century of revolution, two world wars, and occupation by a hostile neighbor, before arriving in the safe haven of Fortress America? I know I can’t—and I’ve tried imagining what my refugee parents went through. I’ve even written a few books about it. And I know I still don’t know. Aside from the horrific bombing of the Twin Towers on September 11th at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this landmass has remained mercifully free of armed attack by foreign agents. The last major battle on American soil was between Americans themselves. And that was before my time (unless you count the January 6th attack on the Capitol).

I know violence can plague even the most seemingly privileged lives, abuse, sexual and psychological, can destroy families that seem to have it all. There is often a war hidden inside every peace. Now add a few bombs, drone attacks, machine gun showers, and tank rounds to the mix of so-called ordinary life, and you have what Timothy Snyder labeled “the Bloodlands.” Yet even there, or especially there, the longing for justice has never died out. That should give the rest of us hope. It may appear to be hope against hope, but it must never become hope abandoned.

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“The quest for justice has turned me from a novelist and mother into a war crimes researcher,” Victoria Amelina wrote in the preface to her posthumously published, Looking at Women Looking at War.

A week before COVID changed the dynamic of life around the globe, Victoria sat in our living room in Medford, with a group of other writers published by Arrowsmith. They were from New Jersey, California, Nigeria, Iran, and France and had gathered for an informal conversation on the subject of home. I don’t remember many details of what was said. What stays with me is the warmth of the encounter, and how eager everyone was to say a few words about their home, about why they’d left (politics, school, love) and under what circumstances they might be tempted to return. I do recall Victoria, soft-spoken, often smiling, saying she was eager to get back to her native city of Lviv, Ukraine.

The following week COVID struck and everything changed.

Victoria managed to get back home, and once the epidemic passed she returned to traveling. She was in Egypt with her young son when Russia attacked Kyiv on February 24, 2022. Somehow amid the chaos of those days, they were able to get back to Lviv again. Soon after she began her transformation from novelist and mother to war crimes researcher. She never set aside her pen, but she learned to shoot. A year into the war we taught an online course in creative writing to students across Ukraine, often hearing air-raid sirens sounding in the background. Victoria never flinched. It seemed like the word “justice” was always on her lips.

Justice. Such a little word, yet one whose meaning has spawned tens of thousands of pages of exposition. Philosophers and jurists across different cultures and time periods have written about it. At American universities, it’s the subject of entire courses. I co-taught one myself a couple of years ago, with a political scientist. More than once I thought of Walter Raleigh’s line “Tell wisdom she entangles/Herself in overwiseness.” After all, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have demonstrated that even three-year-olds have a sense of justice—which, alas, they seem to lose by the time they reach their teens.

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The question of taking up arms is of course hypothetical—and may it remain that way. May I never have to find out how I would react. But other adjacent questions are suddenly pressing on many of us. Do we stay and resist an assault on the values in which we believe? Or do we leave?

Everyone, no matter how powerful they may appear at any given moment, eventually weakens. And when they do, the fruits of their deeds begin to ripen.

A number of important American intellectuals have recently decided the situation is threatening enough that they should abandon this country, at least for now. Because democracy is in its death throes and full-blown totalitarianism is right around the corner.

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Whenever I hear dirges for democracy, I imagine Lydia Maria Child shaking her head in wonder. Have we forgotten what odds she faced, a hundred years before her kind would even be allowed to vote? Where do we think we’d be today if she, and others like her, had given in to fear or chosen despair over their determination to end the savagery of slavery?

And I think of my friend Victoria Amelina, who turned away from what had been a comfortable life, putting aside her own creative work in order to keep what she called a “War and Justice Diary” by traveling the country and entering deep into unsettled zones in order to document Russian war crimes. Killed by a Russian missile as it struck a popular restaurant near the front lines, she has in death become a legendary figure of conscience embodied.

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When Putin launched his insane war, I’d been immersed in reading about the esoteric Tibetan practice known as “rainbow body.” Since then I’ve been mulling the question of evil. Hannah Arendt wrote that it would be the fundamental question haunting Europe after the war. She expected everyone would have to face it. But no one really did. It was too hard, requiring definitions, judgment, even condemnation, and who had the confidence for that? God was dead, so wasn’t everything permitted?

But is God dead? Have they found the body? I’ve never understood why the ability of science to unfold fundamental principles governing matter suggests an end to metaphysics. One of Tolstoy’s last stories is titled God Sees the Truth but Waits. It’s in the nature of the lie to be exposed—otherwise we’d never know it to be a lie. Truth.

When Martin Luther King Jr., echoing Theodore Parker, observed that the moral arc of the universe was long “but it bends toward justice,” was he simply offering false hope to all who feel cruelly used by the world?

Our desire for justice is deeply ingrained. We long for decency and are unwilling to give it up or call it a pipe dream. Every time we witness an abuse of power, by an individual or a state, we cringe and wonder when we will see justice done.

I wonder if we’d recognize it when we saw it.

It’s possible that justice might not manifest in the form we expect. We may want war criminals on trial at the Hague. We may believe that the only adequate form of justice requires another round of Nuremberg-style trials. But what if the retribution visited on those who disregard the fundamental holiness of this world is subtler, and in a way, more chilling? What if, instead of sitting in the docket facing their victims, those who played the role of torturer and executioner lose all capacity to feel the things that make life worth living—warmth, compassion, love—and are instead reduced to numbness, living sheathed in ice, like Dante’s Satan?

Everyone, no matter how powerful they may appear at any given moment, eventually weakens. And when they do, the fruits of their deeds begin to ripen. Ask the executioner approaching his deathbed how he sleeps.