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09/12/01 - I am deeply disturbed by this horrific tragedy, but my gut tells me this goes deeper than the fundamental elements of humanity. I am more moved to despair by the anger our government and our media are fostering in our citizens. This is truly a senseless act of destruction. Over and over the media have recalled a number of historic acts of this magnitude perpetrated on Americans, on American soil. All of them, save the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, were carried out by our own blood. This destruction has been compared to the civil war, the war between the states, a product of our own sentiments. The senselessness of the loss of life in this tragedy has been compared to the Oklahoma City bombing by our own Timothy McVeigh. If you continue to examine the annals of our own propensity for this type of senseless mayhem, all of our presidential assassinations have been successfully carried out by fellow Americans. We have allowed ourselves to be distracted with the Osama Bin Laden decoy because we don't have the courage to recognize the potential for this devastation to have been conducted by our own, despite what our history shamelessly holds up for our own eyes to see. Vice Pres. Cheney has stated "we do not need to be 100% sure" before we launch our retaliatory strike. The local newscast tonight showed members of this community finding an appropriate outlet for our growing anger, at a gun range. The owner proudly condones the squeezing of a trigger to release the anger provoked by the "somebody" that did this to us. Solace in violence. Our president vows to avenge the deaths of these thousands of fellow Americans, with his eyes myopically locked on the Arabs. Will he have the courage to eradicate this evil from the face of the earth, should it be discovered this tragedy was the senseless product of American temperance? Will Rep. Bob Barr support the assassination of an American should it be discovered that an American orchestrated this catastrophe; will he be this generation's Jack Ruby? I am grossly disturbed at the tone and magnitude of violence flowing from our president and our government and even our citizens, finding their solace in the firing of weapons, directing our anger toward foreign lands, particularly when we have such a track record of our own senseless brutality towards ourselves. This brightest beacon of freedom and opportunity has bred its own evil and we do not need to look to foreign peoples and their hatred for western culture to find its source. We harbor this evil quietly in each of our neighborhoods, nurturing it with the language of revenge, justified violence, unknowingly embracing it as we sleep with our loaded guns beneath our pillows, only to be jolted awake by the reality of another bloody rampage by yet another angry American citizen. We are collapsing in on ourselves and with a proud abundance of the greatest American apathy, we lack the motivation to change our own destiny.
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