Some people use a recording of rain’s soothing white noise to put themselves to sleep. I like to be woken up by the real thing. My house is surrounded by old red oaks and on a warm,  quiet night—the windows wide—a sudden downpour startles me happily awake, the oak leaves twitching and twittering like a million sparrows bathing in a puddle. That gentle sound is a blessing, life affirming, consoling. People ask me often where I find hope. I certainly don’t find hope in the behavior of most of the world’s governments, especially my own. But the sound of rain, that promise, that’s different.

This past Sunday, the rain came at 4 am. After several hot, dry days, my first thought upon waking was for the young frail lettuces in the garden—how grateful they would be. And the newly transplanted tomato plants would revive from their afternoon wilt. As native people say, “Water is life.”

But then, lying in the dark, I remembered the news late Saturday night: Trump had sent bombs and missiles raining into Iran. He announced proudly that the targets were obliterated. My rain-induced, life-affirming thoughts were also obliterated. While I was feeling blessed by the rain, Iranian bodies were being ripped to shreds. It’s a war crime for a country to attack another without being attacked first. Iran had not threatened us. It’s against our Constitution for a president to launch a war without a validating vote by Congress. There was no such vote. Trump’s justification was that Iran was close to assembling a nuclear bomb. Our own intelligence agency assessment was that this was not true. Starting a war without the support of Congress is an act of a dictator. Trump’s “intelligence” was the assurance of Iran’s intentions by Israel’s Netanyahu, who had begun bombing Iran several days earlier. Perhaps the only world leader more dishonest than Trump is Netanyahu. He had been trying to enlist the United States in a war against Iran for many years.

The Americans Who Tell the Truth project began in response to the U.S. government lying about the urgent need to attack Iraq in 2003 because Iraq was—supposedly—preparing weapons of mass destruction to attack us. Not true. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed, cities and cultural treasures destroyed. Thousands of American soldiers were killed and wounded. This was a war crime, a crime against humanity. No one was ever held accountable. The United States does not hold itself to account for its war crimes.

In 2015 President Obama had worked out an international agreement, diplomatically, to limit Iran’s enrichment of uranium to well below weapons grade.That agreement was called the The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). It was working. Trump tore it up during his first term. Instead of using diplomacy to restructure the treaty, he chose bombs. On TV I watched Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth exult over their power to destroy. They were like a couple of sociopathic two year olds gleefully demolishing  towers of blocks—their egos inflated by each “spectacular” explosion. They did everything but pull down their pants and brag about the size of their missiles. What was exposed, though, was not manliness; rather, their moral and spiritual puniness. They are as arrogant as they are cruel, as corrupt as they are unqualified to be world leaders. Diplomatic solutions are humane and persist; violence breeds violence. (Violence is also hugely profitable to the weapons makers.)

Meanwhile, it was still raining—the blessed, gentle rain.  Not like the climate-change-induced torrents in many places; those flood-ravaging, water-is-death rains. As Trump and Netanyahu and Putin celebrate their ever-bigger detonations, it’s the environmental war that must concern us most deeply, the war waged against the Earth, the war of exploitation and profit being fanned by the same “leaders” who mock diplomacy. They mock science, too, and deny climate change. Those men who gloat over their bunker buster bombs, gloat over their power to destroy nature the same way they destroy Gaza or Ukraine. Violence against nature breeds violence against humans. And, as we know, nature bats last.