Needed Back Talk on 9-11-2011

The emotional banality we are enduring today, the ten year anniversary of the horror inflicted on us,
is understandable.

We as a nation had not experienced such gall from an enemy since the War of 1812, and that seldom rises to the level of conciousness in anyone, save historians.

Pearl Harbor was a day of infamy which got our attention big time,  and yet it was not an attack on  America as we perceived it to be in those days.  Hawaii was a chain of islands in the Pacific. Few if any Americans forsaw or considered that it would become a state, and even since it is,  it is still thought of as a territory, as is Alaska, in the mode of Puerto Rico.

But New York?  DC?  That's different.  That's us! That event was like a mugging in our own neigborhood, a place long considered safe from those who we thought wouldn't dare come into where we actually live.and take a chance that they could succeed. 

What changed?  It is a change which defies and goes against what we have long thought to be the mostly normal human instinct to survive. Some humans,  it seems, can become convinced that their
future is brighter after death than in this life.

We have only to try to understand why some of us consider taking our own lives, to grasp what is going on in the minds of people who sacrifice their own lives. 

Some long for death because in life they are in constant pain, physical and/or emotional.

Some long for death, even look forward to dying, because they have become convinced that their
release from the horrible reality of their lives depends on their killing others whom they have been told to believe are those who are responsible for their horrible and intolerable existence.

We were given a warning about this, to us, aberration,during WW II.  Many Americans died when Japanese suicide bombers crashed their planes and themselves into American Navy ships.

Still, that was years ago.  Surely we didn't still have to be on guard for that right here in New York.

We were so wrong, and our error in not anticipating the actions of humans beings intent on killing themselves in the process of killing as many others as possible in the process will continue to haunt us as a people, a nation, until we as particpants in our culture as voters, endorse and elect leaders who are willing to  say and do what is the right thing to do, even if it results in their defeat for re-election

So, what is the right thing to do? If you need to ask, you wouldn't understand it.