Grammatical Bacteria

I'm not sure it's a scientific fact but it seems to be an everyday truth: people who have nothing to live for, will find something to die for. And then they'll want you to die for it, too.

How else to explain 'suicide-bombings' which many now refer to (more correctly) as homicide-bombings? More pragmatically, how can anyone defend against such a tactic? How could anyone NOT so inclined ever understand the logic and commitment such an attitude entails?

I was looking through some of my journals last night (you are surprised I keep a journal? No, I think not) and it's interesting where I was emotionally and philosophically, so to speak, six and ten years ago (those journals just happened to be on hand). I looked at concerns last night that I voiced at the time as if they were written by and in a stranger's hand. The expression says no one enters the same river twice, because both he and the river have changed but (and I don't pretend to be an historian, just someone who hears the clock of inevitability ticking ever louder), future generations, everywhere on the planet may come to see 09-10-01 as the highpoint of what we were and what we did, the crown of creation, charred to a cinder of memory in the fires following the events of 09-11-01.

We've been pretty good in the USA at picking up the pieces and 'getting on with it'. We've patched most of the holes in the physical structures and smothered the emotional holes with memorials and remembrances services. Cynics have suggested for many it's been 'business as usual' and some events seem to bear that out. The same men and women who are always called upon to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, continue to be called upon everyday in every way . Meanwhile, we have REMF, surrounded by their coteries and courtesans, celebrating themselves as if End Days were the spring collection at Dolce and Gabbana.

If we don't create a successful strategy for all to share in the reward and not use class-colored glasses to view and divide our world into 'that's hot' and 'not so much', then we can stop fearing the lunatics who promise our bloody end and begin to fear ourselves as we become so hollow that we collapse from the inside. When words like 'duty, honor and country' are just grammatical bacteria with no more meaning than 'have a nice day' we will have become those whom we hate.
-bill kenny