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Friends in the US,
One of the many chilling scenes in Francis Ford
Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" is Marlon Brando as the deranged, possibly renegade,
Colonel Kurtz sitting in the darkness and mumbling "the horror, the horror".
That was my reaction to what I watched on TV.
I was in Sydney for work, and I had gone to sleep
in the hotel watching some TV show. When I woke at about midnight Sydney time, I
thought I was watching a movie until it dawned on me that this was real time
from New York. Like countless others I sat glued, the replays of the second
plane stunned me, and then the two towers collapsing. My god, the suffering, the
deaths, and what will be the inevitable reaction of the US
government.
It is glib to suggest, as many have, that countless
others are killed in other conflicts: Rwanda, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, the
remnants of the USSR, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Peru, .... the list is endless.
These are the times I despair of the human
race. I simply don't see that because my faith in a god is different from yours,
that I need to demonstrate that with an AK 47. As it happens, I am an atheist.
One of the major reasons is that in a deep visceral way, I cannot, simply
cannot, believe that any god worth worshipping would countenance the slaughter
in his / her / its name.
But this is my brain talking. My gut is still numb
with what I saw, and my initial reaction is the one that counts: the sheer
horror.
To all our American friends I send my profound
sympathy. The world is now a far worse place to live in.
John
John Pickard
PO Box 793 Dubbo
NSW 2830 Australia
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