Barack Obama for President in '09

I've got some news for you, and you may be shocked. You see, Barack Obama's our President.

No, really.

I'm not sure whether you heard it or not, since it was hard to make it out over all the shouts and sounds of celebration. It may have been an election of epic proportions, as it seems a large portion of the population would be gathering along Pennsylvania Avenue to spread palm branches in his path as he rode to his inauguration on a donkey's colt. Meanwhile, in other locations, there would be a weeping and gnashing of teeth as people stood by to witness the abomination of desolation.

See, this is exactly the sort of thing that's been bothering me for so long, and I'm afraid it's not going to stop now that the election's over. It's been so long since we had a "normal" election, that I think we forgot what it was like. John McCain's concession speech was quite moving and humble, but a speech like that should be the norm. Politicians like McCain and Obama must live in the eye of the storm, where there is calm enough that they can actually graciously bow out of a race or accept victory. How many people were surprised and disappointed when John Kerry conceded after only a day of waiting, rather than fighting it out over weeks like we did in 2000? In the age we live in of electronic counting of votes, there should rarely be a reason that elections take more than 24 hours. This Election Day went satisfyingly smoothly, like that refreshing beer that most people would probably enjoy sharing with their candidate, but not the other. (Side note for those who still think Barack Obama is a Muslim: I thought he should have dispelled rumors by being photographed eating pork, but he was photographed drinking alcohol, which wasn't enough for some. No matter.)

I myself would probably enjoy sharing a beer with either candidate, or even President Bush, despite our differences in politics. Maybe that's my problem; that I don't try and divide people into who I'd enjoy being around and who I wouldn't. I've commented many times before actually that while I strongly despise what Osama bin Laden stands for, I suspect he's rather friendly and personable on a one-on-one basis, since he's only human. All of these people are only human. They're just people. To quote from C.S. Lewis' Prince Caspian:

"You come from Lord Adam and Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content."

Whether you believe in the story of Adam and Eve, whether or not you're of any particular religious persuasion, I think this is a deep truth, and one we need to apply to all of our leaders, as well as our aspiring leaders. We're all just human beings.

There's a lot of talk about the fact that Obama is now our first black President, and what an historic moment it is. This is definitely true, but I think there's something to be said about it after we savor the moment as simply a moment. A pundit on television election night made an interesting observation as he was talking with an elderly black gentleman who had been involved with the struggles for racial equality in the '50s and '60s. I don't remember his exact words, and not being connected to the Internet as I write this, I can't look them up, but he said something like, "The really great thing about this transition point in history is that unlike similar transitions in the past, there was not so much of a struggle, but simply an acceptance of it. This was the act of approval by the whole country." Yes, unlike the desegregation of our schools, our places of business, and our professional sports, which largely had to be forced, the desegregation of that exclusive 44-member club came about with about as much conflict as any other inauguration (although the actual inauguration is still two months to come).

Really, this should be no surprise on at least one level. Sure, if you want to make sure there are people of certain races in the local school, you can endeavor to force them to go there, and force those who don't want them there to accept them, albeit begrudgingly. It is, however, the nature of a democratically-elected office that you can't force this one, so of course it happened peacefully. There may indeed have been people who voted for Obama because he's black, but I doubt the number that voted for him specifically for that reason was high. Speaking for myself, I would never vote for Al Sharpton, nor would I vote for Clarence Thomas (were he to run), but it has nothing to do with their race and everything to do with their politics. It's simply the case that given the current political climate, Obama was more palatable than McCain to a majority of voters.

In some ways, it's this matter-of-fact-ness that I see as the reason we have to let this moment pass. Yes, it's a great day in our history, but it still has potential to be a dismal four years. Obama is still just another politician; I have high hopes for his term in office, but like everyone who has gone before, he will disappoint us. Not all the time; hopefully not even much of the time; but certainly some of the time.

See, that feeling so many of us feel that is seen as a moment of triumph has great potential to become a moment of sorrow. Every time we look at Obama and say, "Look at how great our President is doing...and he's black!" we give an open invitation for his detractors to say at other times "Look at how terrible our President is doing...and he's black!" Is that what we want?

I'll mention Asimov's biography again, as I've been doing ever since I read it. A Jewish friend once came to Asimov (who is likewise from a Jewish background) and said, "I'm really proud that an inordinately large number of Nobel laureates are Jewish!" Asimov replied, "Did you know that an inordinately large number of pornographic film producers and directors are Jewish?" The man was stunned. "Is that true?" he asked. Asimov replied, "I made it up, but it could be true. How would you feel if it was?"

The point here is, if you're going to take everything Obama does in his life and put it in the mental sorting bin of "African-American achievements", then you're going to have to put his failures there, too, and he will have them. George W. Bush has left behind more than a few messes to clean up that simply won't be pretty no matter what the resolution. In inheriting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, history will put part of the blame for the aftermath of those wars on Obama's shoulders. Do you think a really happy ending is likely there? Do you think it's unthinkable that yet another war might begin while Obama is in office? Contrary to the beliefs of some (and such beliefs I find offensive, even as a Democrat who is no fan of the Bush presidency), the 9/11 attacks were on our country as a whole, not on any particular administration. If al-Qaeda strikes again in the next four years, don't think Obama will fail to respond with some sort of military action.

But I'm getting off track. I think Obama is going to be a good President, maybe the best we've had since Kennedy, but we really can't know how things will turn out, can we? As a T-shirt slogan I saw on the Internet said in reference to Obama, "Dare to hope. Prepare to be disappointed." I think it was referring to the election, but really, we should have an attitude like that about the next four years.

Barack Obama is just another President, and compared to some people it makes me a pessimist (compared to many others, it makes me an optimist, of course) to believe that the next four years will just be a fairly run-of-the-mill time period. But think about it, all you Obama true believers and hopers: in comparison to the last eight years, wouldn't "run-of-the-mill" be a great improvement? I, for one, welcome it.

Lord of Atlantis

The thought should have comforted Bobby but it didn't. He found himself thinking of what William Golding had said, that the boys on the island were rescued by the crew of a battle-cruiser and good for them...but who would rescue the crew? ...[T]he words still haunted Bobby. What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about. -Hearts in Atlantis, Stephen King, p. 153

Hearts in Atlantis may be one of the best books I've ever read, and perhaps the reason why may make me more than a bit of a cynic. Stephen King has written an awful lot of books, and they vary greatly in subject, tone and even genre. Generally, I think of him as a very good writer, someone who has the ability to show us the serious and dark side of things, often using metaphors of the supernatural. A lot of people see his work as being schlocky, but to me, that's part of the magic of it: Yes, he's schlocky, but there's still something powerful in what he has to say that both his casual fans and dismissive detractors will miss.

I remember as a high school freshman writing my first real essay on a book in response to The Shining. What I mean by "real essay on a book" is that this was something that went beyond elementary-school "book reports" in which you essentially wrote up a page synopsis of what happened on the surface of the plot of the book you had just read. You know, this would be the sort of thing like, "The Shining is a book about a writer who spends the winter in a haunted hotel and tries to kill his family." Throw in some descriptions of the main characters and evaluations such as, "I thought this book was awfully spooky, but good," to pad it out to 250 words and you'll pass seventh-grade English. I remember thinking with great satisfaction as I produced that essay that this was something much better than just a grouping of words set on paper to keep me from flunking out, just as The Shining was far more than a haunted house story.

Maybe it was growing up with an alcoholic stepfather that made me see the story the way I did. (I suppose I should insert the disclaimer that I'm not playing the victim card here: I'm sure I had it much better than many children with alcoholic parents; my stepfather was a drunk, but not abusive.) I argued that The Shining was an allegory for the way that alcohol abuse can transform a person into something ugly that's not really who they should be, and thus destroy their family. Sure, the fictional Overlook Hotel was a place with a dark history and seemingly crowded with evil spirits, but it seemed clear to me that the "spirits" that were of the most concern were the ones that had caused the protagonist to lose control and break his three-year-old son's arm long before he ever even heard of the Overlook, and the ghost of that shame haunted his life in a far more terrifying way than any supernatural specter could ever manage.

The Shining was not a book I had been assigned to read, and I doubt it's a book that is often assigned to students as required reading, although it's pretty good. I read somewhere recently (I'm afraid I don't recall where it was) that there is usually nothing that will squash interest in a book for a reader more quickly than telling them they have to read it, and I think there's definitely truth to it. Had various middle and high school reading lists been different, I no doubt would have liked William Shakespeare considerably more and Stephen King considerably less, but there was one book that I was assigned to read in high school that instilled an excitement in me that even requirement to read could not dull. That book was Golding's Lord of the Flies, a book that King featured prominently in both Hearts in Atlantis and Cujo.

What I particularly remember about it was the discussions that took place in the class in which we were assigned Lord of the Flies. It seemed that few of my classmates found the story believable and saw the world and its people with far more of a rosy tint than I could allow myself. Surely, if children in real life were to act like the children in the book, it must be because they were somehow taught to act so. Violence and hatred don't come naturally, and most of us are much better than that, right? I didn't know why it was they thought so, but life had taught me otherwise. In first grade, waiting for the bus to school, a young man had been hit by a car, and fellow elementary school students had crowded the curbside shouting, "Cool, look at all the blood!" as we waited for an ambulance to arrive. In second grade, I'd seen classmates break into fistfights over someone cutting in line for the drinking fountain when another drinking fountain not four feet away had no line at all. In fourth grade, a playground bully realized he couldn't get at me in front of the teacher monitoring the playground at lunch, so he found out what route I used to walk home and met me there with five of his friends to help hold me down and beat me up. I remember a summer in junior high in which a tent mate at my summer camp thought that retaliating against someone who'd dumped a bucket of cold water on him by dumping a bucket of scalding-hot water on them was a neat idea. Besides all these overt physical acts of violence, there was the fact that there was hardly a single child in the world I knew that had not at some point in time engaged in some form of character assassination against a schoolmate.

Nobody has to teach children to be selfish, that's just natural and (God help us) even logical. It seems a fact of life that we have to be selfish in order to survive, at least to some degree. Yet in addition to that, nobody seems to need to teach us how to be petty, cruel and backbiting either. Every child wants to be well-liked, but for some reason I cannot fathom (although surely I've not been immune) most children seem to want to decrease the popularity, esteem and success of others. Our parents don't tell us to go to kindergarten and call some other kid a "poo-poo head"; we just do it...because. The school bully who shakes down smaller kids for their lunch money probably isn't hard up for cash; he just enjoys causing fear and humiliation and the ensuing sense of power it gives him. I have been made to understand, both from women who have had to live with it and from Hollywood, that girls engage in a subtle sort of social bullying that's far worse than anything we boys can imagine or even understand, and it seems to come as naturally and regularly as their monthly cycle.

That's what's really so engaging and chilling about Lord of the Flies: the fact that it's somehow more than a mere work of fiction. We live it. As children, we seem to be constantly a moment away from breaking down into complete anarchy and savagery. It's a cliché that has some great truth to it: that it only takes a minute for the teacher to step out of the classroom for the spitballs to come out. Sometimes, it's more than spitballs. Sometimes, it doesn't matter if the teacher has left the classroom. Years before the infamous tragedy at Columbine high school, King wrote a story called "Rage", in which a high school student walks into a classroom with a gun and shoots the teacher. What ensues in the story is not a massacre, but an afternoon in which this student, who has crossed over a line that most of us hopefully would never cross, shows how close to crossing over lines the others in the class have come themselves. Once again, King shows a side of horror that's not rooted in the supernatural at all, this time in a more straightforward fashion, allegories left by the wayside. In doing so he gives a story that's chilling not only in itself, but in the fact that recent years have shown us that so very dark tale is far lighter fare than the facts that the nightly news will bring. Many of us would rather have the fantasy, because the good guys so often win in the end.

It's something that we tend to do to lighten the weight of evil. Both in fiction and in real life, we look to the supernatural to explain away evil. In Cujo (oddly enough, one of my least-favorite King novels), the story revolves around a rabid dog that directly and indirectly causes the deaths of many people in a town that a few years before had been victimized by a serial killer. More than once, characters from the book seem to be of the opinion that somehow the spirit of this serial killer is haunting the town, maybe even possessing the rabid dog in order to carry on the killing spree even in death. It's a work of fiction, but in real life, rational people don't think of serial killers that way, do they? It would be easier, though. Rather than think that a fellow human being would be capable of certain atrocities, there's almost a comfort in imagining that a demonic force drove him to kill, and that same force lingered around so we could place upon it the blame for the tragic accident of a rabid dog left to run free and kill some more.

Just a few years after my class read Lord of the Flies, in that same small rural high school where my classmates couldn't believe in the imagined atrocities of children left to their own devices, a student decided that breaking up with his girlfriend was too much trouble, and it would be easier to kill her and dump the body in a ravine. The story briefly made national news as it was announced his lawyer would actually plead before the court that the boy was possessed by Satan. Heck, I'm a Christian and actually believe that Satan is a real being, and yet I call this bullshit. I don't know how the case turned out, nor do I want to, but I do know this: we as human beings don't like to think that one of us is capable of killing simply to get out of a date, but from what I have seen, history shows that human beings are willing to kill just because we can.

Lord of the Flies is probably not a book that often gets pigeonholed into a specific genre, being left in that wide-open field of 'fiction' (or the more pretentious 'literature'), but really, it's 'horror' through and through. We've been conditioned by our culture to think of 'horror' as a genre to be a sort of sub-genre of 'sci-fi/fantasy', in which terrible, bloody things happen at the hand of fantastic subhuman or superhuman beings, but we forget that the true horror of life is that terrible things happen constantly in the natural world by the will of perfectly natural humans. Adolph Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden aren't "monsters", but regular people like you and me who used their influence over others to encourage acts of great evil. The boys on that island may be products of fiction, but their actions are tame compared to those of their non-fictional contemporaries in many parts of the world.

Bobby Garfield, the young protagonist of the first story in Hearts in Atlantis, comes into contact with some fearsome evil beings sprung from a fictional world in Stephen King's head: the "low men in yellow coats." (They're not much like the toned-down characters in the movie with Anthony Hopkins, for those who have seen it but not read the book.) Yet these strange characters–who we rational readers realize will never cross paths with us in the real world–are not nearly so frightening as a variety of other characters that he comes across whom he thinks of as also being "low men", but not at all in a supernatural sense. At a pivotal point in his story, his girlfriend is accosted by three older boys, who beat her with a baseball bat. (Another minor recurring theme of King's work is the use of mundane sports equipment for violent acts: In the movie version of The Shining, the father attacks his family with an ax, but in the novel, it was a mallet from a game like croquet. In 'Salem's Lot, the protagonist stakes the heart of a vampire with a broken baseball bat. Coincidentally, the real-life murder in my home town involved a baseball bat as well.) The story being set in 1960, many of the boys in the story grow up and are sent to fight in Vietnam where they, as adults, will perform acts perhaps far more gruesome than beating up an eleven-year-old girl with a baseball bat, and this time, they'll do it with the support of their government.

The characters in this book struggle with the issues of senseless violence in different ways: trying to atone for it, living in denial of it, and in several cases even responding in kind. These are very human reactions, ones that are often explored in the horror genre but here laid bare by lack of extreme measures of the supernatural. There's something extremely frightening about schoolboys that beat up a girl with a baseball bat that bogeymen and space aliens can't seem to match, because things like the former happen every day. Anne Rice vampires philosophically contemplating the morality of taking the blood of innocents in order to satisfy their lust for blood may make for good entertainment, but governments contemplating the same to satisfy the lust for petroleum and power? We have to live with that in the real world! The phrase "man's inhumanity to man" has always seemed a strange one to me, as "inhumanity" seems to be one of the hallmarks of humanity.

I had been working on this piece of writing off and on for some time, at one point thinking it would be an appropriate piece for publishing on September 11th, a date most people today relate to the real-world reality of horror. (As it is, today, the 19th, is an appropriate anniversary as well, although even more mundane and less well-known.) There's a big part of me that is glad I waited, for a few reasons. I'm much less sentimental about anniversaries than most people, rarely seeing significance in a date just because it happens to be that same date that something else happened in the past; after all, calendars are largely arbitrary. As for arbitrariness, I remember for some time that conspiracy buffs were struggling to find meaning in why the attacks happened on September 11, but as far as I know, nobody ever forwarded a theory of substance. September 11th was really just a day like any other day before the first plane crashed, and the date may as well have been chosen by throwing a dart at a calendar. We look for higher meaning in tragedy, perhaps in the hope that if we can understand what "9/11" really means, we'll know when the next date will be. Of course, when (not if) that day comes, it will once again be just another day the morning before whatever tragedy it is occurs.

And as for the senseless violence we perpetrate in response to senseless violence? Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart made a sobering point about 9/11 and all the battles that have been waged over it. "Nineteen people flew into the towers. It seems hard for me to imagine that we could go to war enough to make the world safe enough that nineteen people wouldn’t want to do harm to us." Obviously, we can't. We won't stop violence by answering it with more violence, but we also won't stop it by ignoring it. The truth is, we simply won't stop it, period. All it takes for violence to occur is a single man with a gun, or even a kid with a baseball bat. And that is horror on a level that fiction can never reach.

Tolerance, but only for the tolerant, of course

So in the ongoing saga of the sexy penguins, I decided to check out Google today (I would have done it earlier, but I was having technical difficulties) and found out that sure enough, a Google image search for "sexy penguin" pulls up a link to this blog as the #2 match. For those who might care about the numbers other than myself, I'm trying to keep a running total, and I've presently got 126 out of 157 hits, or roughly 80% of my visitors being people looking for a picture of a sexy penguin.

However, I'm not here to rant about sexy penguins and the people who love them...this time. I am going back to retouch on the original topic in order to use it as a launching point into another topic that's always bugged me.

Quick recap for those who can't be bothered to read the original post: A pro-same-sex marriage organization launched a campaign in Colorado based on the idea that a person who was sexually attracted to members of the same gender is just as normal as a dog that goes "moo". An anti-same-sex marriage organization, rather than pointing out the ridiculousness of this argument as I would have done, launched a counter-campaign to inform the public that dogs in fact do not go "moo". This high level of debate truly shows how serious this issue is.

Well, in tracking down the Google image search result for "sexy penguin", I noticed that under the picture, there was a snippet of text from my blog reading "...mooing dogs and sexy penguins." Curious, I tried a new image search for "mooing dogs", which my blog came up as the #1 hit! (Note that this is only on an image search; a regular web search did not give a link to my blog in the first 150 hits. The first blog hit was for this site, which rants about thwarting the "Heterosexual agenda" because "Dogs are really hard to milk." Good writing.)

As usual, I'm taking far to long to come to my point. Not too far down in the list of hits, I came across this article. Apparently a family in Colorado Springs has had their lawn repeatedly vandalized for having the audacity to put signs on it that feature a picture of a dog saying "Woof." The unknown people who vandalized the lawn and the signs by either stealing them or defacing them actually left notes for the family telling them that "YOU ARE NO BETTER THAN A TERRORIST BECAUSE YOU DISPLAYED THAT SIGN!" They even went so far as to specifically compare them to the September 11th WTC attackers.

I've got to say that this perplexes me on many levels. While I see no evidence in the article that the vandals ever used the specific word "tolerance", the concept was there, as they had written "STOP THE HATE" on the street near the house. I realize that this story was published by a news outlet that is affiliated in some manner (I'm not sure how closely) with the publishers of the "No-Moo-Lies.com" web site, and as such, it is doing its darnedest to paint this conservative family in a positive light, but still, the only "hate" I'm seeing here is on the part of the vandals.

While the family with the signs is indeed sending out a message (albeit fairly subtly) that many may find offensive, all they are doing in the end is expressing an opinion. The vandals are trespassing, damaging private and public property, and probably could easily be construed as threatening the physical safety of others. Why would they prefer to do that rather than pursue a number of perfectly legal and reasonable countermeasures? They could put up signs in their own yards. They could write letters to the family telling them intelligently why they disagree with their position and why they feel it is offensive. They could write letters to local newspapers. They could peaceably conduct a protest in the street in front of the lawn with the signs. And of course, they could vote, and I hope they did. One of the neat things about each of those is that they don't require sneaking around in the middle of the night.

Legality and even morality aside, though, there is a social phenomenon that I've found rather odd lately. I think most people tend to think of the freedoms outlined in the First Amendment in terms of a protection for the liberal free thinkers of our society. If I want to say that George W. Bush is an idiot, I can do so freely. If I want to have my children go to school and not have to practice some sort of state religion, then I'm all set for that, too. Lately it seems like a reversal of that sort of thinking has happened, though. In our society at large, you aren't allowed to like the President because we should all agree that he's evil. You aren't allowed to make any public expression of your religious beliefs lest it offend, because we should all value multiculturalism over all other values. You aren't allowed to think that morality as defined by your personal beliefs has any basis or right to be addressed because we should all with uniform assent that morality is relative.

That's what it really boils down to, and don't you see that there is an inherent hypocrisy and/or lapse of logic in that position? The only absolute value is relativism. All viewpoints should be allowed except for those that question whether all viewpoints should be allowed. Society should have no tolerance for those that practice intolerance. Argh... It makes my brain hurt sometimes.

Look, it's an opinion. Some people in Colorado think same-sex marriage should be allowed; others think it should be disallowed. These are just opinions, same as the opinion that people shouldn't judge others for their sexual orientation. Who is to decide which opinions should be allowed and which should be silenced? It's not simply a matter of being offended, because I assure you that on 99.9% of all issues, there will be somebody offended by either position.

There are a lot of people (and while I tend to feel "homophobia" is an overused term, it seems appropriate here) that are absolutely appalled at the thought of a gay pride parade, but is that single fact good enough reason to disallow such a display? I really feel that the First Amendment allows for people to hold a parade for any reason (so long as they avoid undue disruption of, well, traffic, I guess) be it the local high school's homecoming, abortion rights, a war protest, or even if your local chapter of the KKK wants to put on a show. Excepting probably the first of those examples, there's going to be a lot of people upset by such parades, but my advice is if you don't like it, then stay away, or go and organize a peaceful counter-demonstration. If you show up at an event and hassle or even attack the people there, you just let them believe they are some sort of martyrs for a great cause.

Did you read the article about the family with the vandalized signs? In the end, who wins that moral struggle? Isn't it the poor victimized folks with the peaceful signs on their yard? Completely disregarding what their signs say, and the ideas they are intended to convey to passers-by, aren't they the ones with the moral high ground because the opposition took the position of oppressor? Whoever it was that took those signs, they ought to know that they may have set their cause back more than No-Moo-Lies.com ever could.

Whys and wherefores without wherewithal

What happened five years ago on September 11, 2001 means something different to everyone, but for just about every American, it was a life-changing moment in time.

The people of my generation were told that we would remember 9/11 vividly the way a previous generation would remember the assassination of President Kennedy. I do actually remember fairly vividly many of the details of that morning. I remember sleeping in on that morning, as I had already decided to take the day off of work for personal reasons, and the phone rang. It was my mother-in-law, who urged me and my wife to turn on the television. "Somebody's bombed New York or something!" We turned it on in time to see the first building collapse.

For me though, there was an eerie quality to the whole first half of September that I occasionally play over in my mind. For me personally, the events of 9/11/2001 were one tragedy in the midst of a string of several that happened in my life. In my life, but not directly to me, I suppose, tragedy is a strange thing. Tragedies come with a factor of distance and severity. The other tragedies were closer to me but of course less severe than a pair of 100-story buildings collapsing to kill several thousand people. Still, the exchange in those factors made them all seem fairly even to me in a fashion; does that make sense?

Many of the things that happened were too personal to discuss here, but I will speak of the first and the last of them all. First, a beloved family member passed away. There had just been a funeral, right at the start of the month. He had gone to the doctor complaining of some problems, and the doctor had told him nothing was wrong, he should go home and rest. So he did. A couple days later, he was dead.

Why did the doctor miss his diagnosis? Why did this man accept the diagnosis without question, even as his symptoms grew worse? Why did he have to die? Why does it hurt for those of us left behind even though all of us who were believers in Christ were certain of this man's salvation, and felt it safe to assume he was in heaven? None of those are questions that are easy to answer.

The last thing that happened, to me anyway, was that I received notice of a friend and co-worker from a couple years back having committed suicide. She was an intelligent, beautiful, fun person that everybody liked, and she seemed to have a lot going for her as far as anybody knew. But apparently on the 9th of September, she hung herself in her apartment, and wasn't discovered until nearly a week after. She left no note.

Why did she kill herself? What was it that was causing her enough suffering that dying seemed like an improvement over her situation? Was there anything that I myself could have done, either at the time or back years previously when I had known her better, to change her mind? Does suicide really relieve one of suffering if there is an afterlife? Might she have suffered worse or found a reason to live if she had waited a few more days and seen the horror in New York? These are questions that are virtually impossible to answer.

But while I had never been to New York, while I had never seen the towers in person, while I didn't know any of the people who died on *that* day, some of the most nagging questions linger on that central event. When two planes crashed into towers in New York and two tried (one unsuccessfully) to crash into buildings in Washington, DC, we were left with a lot of questions that I sometimes wonder who is asking.

Why? Don't we want to know why? This isn't about 72 houris awaiting each hijacker in paradise, not to Osama bin Laden. This isn't about "Islamofascists" who "hate freedom". I don't buy that. Osama bin Laden wanted to send a message to the world. Even if we refuse to respect that message, even if we condemn that message for the brutal manner in which it was sent, doesn't the severity of that make us want to sit up and at least hear what it was he was trying to say? If only to respond intelligently?

It's an odd thing about myself. My religious beliefs lead me to hold the view that human beings are, at their heart, evil. Yet at the same time, I believe that there also exists a drive in people that makes them desire to do what they think is the right thing. Bin Laden and his cohorts who planned out and executed the attacks of 9/11 may appear to be evil, and indeed, they most likely are. Isn't it not just possible, but likely that they believed that what they were doing was the right thing to do? The 19 hijackers were willing to give their lives for it. The al-Qaeda organization, while maybe weaker than it once was, still exists, so I assume its members didn't look at 9/11 and say, "My, that was a bit too brutal for my tastes!"

The majority of the people of the world heard about what had happened to our country on 9/11, and their sympathy and support went out to us as a nation. That is a good thing. However, there exists a minority of the world's population who, upon hearing the news, celebrated. Some of these people are in fact so elated by this attack, that if they had the chance to be a part of another attack like it in the future, they wouldn't hesitate. This is a phenomenon that makes me want to ask "Why?" but unlike the other things that make me want to ask "Why?" there are people who are willing, able, and probably eager to answer it. Shouldn't more of us be asking?