Editor’s note: The IJ is reprinting some of the late Beth Ashley’s columns. This is from 2006.

We sat on the porch of our cabin at Sea Ranch and watched the ocean and the birds and the light breeze ruffle the meadow nearby. The only sound was the murmur of waves coming and going and beating against the offshore rocks.

We didn’t look at a newspaper for three days.

But on Monday night, I read about the children who had died in Lebanon, and on the TV I saw rockets fly toward Israel. Larry King interviewed Jordan’s former Queen Noor, who said she was stunned that no one had yet brokered a cease-fire, that “the voices of reason have all been drowned out.”

The peace and quiet of Sea Ranch fell away.

How much longer can people like me sit in our idyllic enclaves and believe we are safe?

How can we go on believing that craziness like what is happening in the Middle East is not going to spread to our shores — perhaps as far as to meadows like these?

Two of my grandchildren went to Sea Ranch, too, and my heart lurches with pain when I think of the world they’ll inherit.

I know I am not alone.

A couple of weeks ago, when NASA sent a team of astronauts into space, I wondered if they could see the Earth’s many conflagrations, small puffs of smoke and fire, marring the blue-marble view of our globe.

My recurring nightmare is that the world as we know it — civilization, the human race — will be obliterated in an escalating atmosphere of folly.

Sometimes we don’t seem far from it.

Someone emailed me Tuesday that “we don’t wage war to attain peace, we wage peace to attain peace,” a truism if there ever was one.

Yet the wars go on, and threaten to spread, and we sit helplessly by, yearning for someone to step forward who knows what to do.

Of course, I don’t know the answer. And there is enough guilt — and ignorance — to go around. The explosions in Lebanon are not our fault, but I do think we are reaping the fruits of our terrible hubris — believing that we could invade the Middle East and somehow bend it to our will.

Now we are boxed in wherever we go. We have chosen sides; we have decided who is good and who evil, forgetting that history shows blood on all hands.

Our intrusions into this web of hatred have made us so toxic we have lost our once-great power to lead.

Sad when the wish of most Americans is to be a force for good in the world.

Now everything we do, however well intentioned, seems to earn us more hatred — a hatred that may explode again and again on our shores.

I want to bury my head in the sand, or fling my arms around my grandchildren.

There was a time when our government maintained relationships with governments we did not like. Some of us reviled that tactic, too. Remember the outcry against former President George H. W. Bush’s friendship with the Saudis, and the photos of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with their king?

Now we cut off nations we do not like. Now we hardly speak, except to throw epithets across the divide.

The quest for peace is elusive. But surely our role should not be as an abetter of war but as an arbiter amongst nations and the crazies who are trying to bring those nations down.

Can we still do it?

As our eyes turn to Lebanon, the rest of the world continues to explode — people are still dying in Iraq and Afghanistan and Darfur; Iran and North Korea are black clouds on the international horizon.

It’s hard to keep track. It’s hard to have hope.

So people like me deaden our pain with a weekend at Sea Ranch, where we keep reality at bay.

War seems far away, our part in it seems very distant, my role is negligible because there’s nothing I’m asked to do.

But the reckoning may not be far away, and I can’t help but tremble at the prospect.