Another Day of Infamy - My private thoughts...
Day two of this crisis, found me in numbed shock, a part of my mind still unable to come to grips with what happened less then twenty-four hours before. Sleep was fitful for both my wife and me, and we tossed and turned until the early morning hours. Finally even before the sun rose, I got up and turned on the television searching for the latest details, the most up to date picture of the aftermath of insanity, praying that no more senseless violence had transpired during the night.
As I sat and watched the images of yesterday’s madness play out before me, on channel after channel, I felt that life as I knew it, as we all knew it had changed. Smoke still rose in white thick sheets from the tons of twisted gray steel, masses of cracked concrete as fires continued to burn unchecked. Paper littered the streets like a carpet. And as the camera paned over the scores of crushed, ash covered cars, vans, and rescue vehicles, their windows shattered and littering the streets like so much confetti, a sadness stole over me, like a sheet thrown over my soul, shutting out the light of reason and hope. The detached fascination of yesterday gave way to the anger, frustration, fear, revulsion, sadness, pride, resolve, and a host of other emotions. And as I watched the rescue personnel comb through the wreckage, tiny black spots among the carnage and debris, the full magnitude of the attack struck home, and overwhelming feelings of anguish swept over me, and I had to hold back the tears that threaten to fall from eyes wide open to the grief and suffering of the living as they searched for the dead and dying. Finally it became too much and I had to turn away…
Later, as I worked I listened to NPR, as first Secretary of State Colin Powel and then the President, call Tuesdays action an “act of war.” By doing so I knew that they had taken yesterdays attack out of the realm of legal rankling and extraction concerns, out of the jurisdiction of the U.S. and World Courts’ and into the realm of air strikes, cruise missiles, free falling bombs,
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