On 7/7/05, P. J. Alling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Sadly, this is a tragedy that's all about politics. It's a bit too late.
No, it's not about politics at all. Neither is it about religion. I'm trying to figure out what it's about. For a while I was thinking it's about Power, but now I'm not so sure. Bin Laden has no illusions, I don't think, that he'll survive what he's doing to lead any peoples, so if it's about power, it's delusions of a nation's (in the broader sense) power. It's about fanaticism and barbarism, misguided principles. Mostly it's about hate. The vast majority of people in this world never experience that kind of hate within themselves. Sadly, it only takes but a few (Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, etc.) to wreak unthinkable horror on large segments of populations. I keep telling myself that such people are aberrations, some sort of genetic or environmental freaks, maybe kids whose mothers did drugs while they were pregnant or something. But whenever events occur as they did this morning my hope for the goodness of the human race flags a bit. Anyway, thanks to Cotty for quelling the political discussion, and thanks to those who were involved for heading his request. Someone mentioned that this wasn't of the scale of 911, and so it wasn't. 911 didn't affect me personally as it did many on this list, but I have to say, when I was in NYC last weekend, and the PATH Subway train pulled into the WTC station, travelling as it does around the excavation of the former foundation of one of the towers, now open to the sky, the feeling was eerie and quite palpable. What happened today is that several hundred individuals died. For the families, friends and colleagues of the dead, it matters not how many others died with them. That individual is gone forever, leaving behind (possibly) a widow or widower, children who will never see that parent again, parents who will live the rest of their life with a child that predeceased them. Sorry to go on like this, but such tragedies make many of us (me included, I guess) think about Big Pictures and the like. It just makes no sense to me. It's completely absurd. I guess we all (including, sadly, the families of the victims) have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that there are simply some things that we can't understand, some conundrums that we'll never get our heads around. This is one of them. I think I'll go have a beer tonight. cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson
