We must grieve first, especially for those directly affected. Terrorists try to create fear. We must not give into it and the attack was easy, anyway. Free, pluralistic, open societies are easy targets. The attack was an attack on our values. If we shared their craziness they might not have attacked us. We must not betray our values because of the attack and become like them. This is what they want.
It is losing. In fact we must renew our commitment to those values and look carefully to see if we have betrayed them already. We need our strength now and those values are our strength. We can make some good out of this terrible event by recommitting ourselves to our essential beliefs and deepening our understanding of those beliefs. It's also the best way to honor the dead.
And so on and so on. Sadly what we got, because of the utter thoughtlessness and lack of character of our leaders, was the opposite. May there be a shooting range in Hell for them where they are eternally the targets. We abandoned our values and lost our national sense of self and our identity. The terrorists have won. The world is now much more the world they wanted: primitive and uncivilized.
The world of the Trojan war, compulsive and destructive, over nothing, but maybe honor. Think, now, what our Homeric epithets would be. Wise or wily? Reactive or restrained? We have lost. We are not the people we claim to be. We stumble around trying to find ourselves but we're unhinged, a nation of lost souls seeking peace, holding to a self-image that doesn't apply, that we're independent and free.
Good luck to us in looking for peace. We have chosen the gods of chaos, mistakenly or unconsciously, in our insistence on simplicity and certainty. We have planted the seeds of discord everywhere thinking we won't be affected or not thinking at all. The terrorist attacks threw that back at us, showing that we're not immune, not a chosen people, perhaps, and not always right and always right with God.
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