I can barely deal with the topic anyway. I still too readily choke up seeing video footage and photographs. There's something at the center of it which is just solid, pure grief, and it pays to stay away from it. Whenever some televised idiot mentions the subject, I tense up, ready to pitch a fit if it's even remotely disrespectful or exploitative.
But I did recently realize something. It's not the deaths. 3,000 people is a lot of people, but a natural disaster, a good earthquake, say, could kill 3,000, and that wouldn't affect me the same way. Nor is it the attack by foreign enemies and the security issue aspect; I'm not afraid.
And then I realized what exactly it was. It's that anyone would DO such a thing.
I mean, anyone can daydream about a plane crash, and maybe you would want some awful thing to happen to a despised opponent.
But to actually do what they did... take innocent men, women and children, and use them as human weapons, and smash them in their jetliners, into other people, to create such carnage, and to do it four times... to actually do what they did, it means that what we, as humans, are capable of horrific things.
Such mindless hatred, such unutterable cruelty...what a yawning, bottomless chasm there is in us. What a psychotic depravity.
I look at the photos of the second plane before it hits the tower, just an instant before, and I am completely undone trying to concieve how they could possibly do such a thing. How could a human being be so utterly inhuman?
I've seen the video now a thousand times, and still gape at it, thinking it can't possibly be true that they are going to fly it straight in.
And then they do.
Before then, I would have thought that no people anywhere could really do such a thing. But I'm wrong, they can,--we can. And that's why I still shed tears.
Think of the cruelty beyond our comprehension, as amongst the screams and the anguish of the innocent, those hijackers drove at full throttle planes laden with fuel into buildings where tens of thousands of people work. They have no moral inhibition on the slaughter of the innocent. If they could have murdered not 7,000 but 70,000, does anyone doubt they would have done so and rejoiced in it? — Prime Minister Tony Blair. |
