Aw, hell

As Your Humble Blogger has mentioned before, one of the unfortunate things about blogging is the urge to blog about any important event as soon as it occurs. I managed to avoid the temptation to slip in a quick note this morning when I heard the news, but I am, it seems, giving in with a barely-more-considered note at this time.

Digression: Not that I blame people who did add a quick note this morning. It expressed their feelings at the time, and this blog thing is a useful tool for doing that. And obviously (I hope obviously) I think things like the LJ community with information for and about London Ljers are a Good Thing. But for bloggers like myself who attempt analyses of the news, or at least essays of an analytic nature inspired by the news, the quick post after the Momentous Event is as much of a trap as the fully operational Death Star. End Digression.

A couple of hours after I heard the news, I happened to be in the car, and therefore listening to The Connection, which of course was discussing the Tube bombings. While I was listening, a caller named Karen made the point that the invasion of Iraq had decreased rather than increased our domestic security. Asked if she expected there to be more bombings, she answered “Yes!”. And laughed.

Now, Karen was not laughing at the dead, or at the possibility of more dead. Her nervous laugh was, if scorning anything, scorning the idea that more terrorist attacks were in doubt. Interpreting the laugh as a laugh of glee would be to put the worst possible interpretation on something is easily interpretable without it. And yet, I cringed. And I cringed, I think, not just to hear somebody laugh at a moment when I was depressed, but because I could immediately imagine that the worst possible interpretation would be put on that laugh, and that the people who support the way Our Only President is addressing the issue will hear only what they are prepared to hear, that liberals hate the President, and America, and its allies, so much that we laugh at tragedy. And this isn’t true, and it offends me.

Of course, my cringing in imaginative anticipation is putting the worst possible interpretation on something which is difficult to interpret because it hasn’t even happened. I am offended by something that I imagine somebody might say, that I can imagine somebody saying. That’s bad.

And if that’s bad, then I ought to be prepared for far worse imaginary responses to my quick and useless analysis of this Momentous Event: the bombings today show again how pathetic and impotent the guerilla war against the West is. Al-Qaida stretched its mighty arm across the world (if it did), coordinating a series of nearly simultaneous blasts, and manages to murder a few dozen people. I understand that for those people, it was the end of the world, and for the wounded and bereaved, it is unimaginably awful. Then, so is a ferry disaster, or a car crash, or a war, or pervasive poverty and disease. If, in fact, this is the worst they can do—heck, if the destruction of the World Trade Centers was the worst they can do, and they got pretty lucky with that—then the West is simply not in trouble.

All of which is to say that the G7.1 leaders should get the hell back to work and do something about pervasive poverty and disease. Not to send a message to the terrorists, or to take away the terrorists’ recruiting tools, or to prevent panic in the streets of London or the world markets, but because that’s their job. A few dozen people dead doesn’t change that. It was bad enough that we changed policies based on a couple of thousand dead; let’s make it clear that this is the world we live in, and go about living in it.

Aw, hell.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.