There are no words which can do justice to the tragedy which occured on Tuesday. I will not attempt to keep this entertaining.
As I watched in the hours from 9am to 1pm as things went from horrible to more and more horrible I felt many things I haven't felt much of lately. I felt a sense of community with a nation whose actions I don't always agree with. It can surely be said that the US has caused grief to many other people in many other nations, but there is little I can think of which is more terrifying than a faceless enemy preying on the lives of the innocent. We want someone to vilify, we want a bad guy. So, I felt a kinship with my fellow Americans for a while. I thought of how our generation hasn't felt the pain of war and hasn't felt truly threatened in my lifetime. I thought about how Pearl Harbor and The Revolutionary war brought people together in opposition of a common enemy. These enemies are now some of our closest allies, and it's curious to wonder how this came about.
So after feeling so concerned about the well-being of the victims and their families, and after wanting to be proud of America and all that it stands for, I am reminded of why I haven't felt this very often before. Americans of all sorts of ethnicities and backgrounds have become targets of racist comments and physical violence over the past 48 hours simply because people want an easy outlet for their frustration at having no idea who to blame for what happened. Closet racists are jumping at the opportunity to fill their comfortable roles as oppressors and adopt a mindless mob mentality. The victims of these terrorist attacks have become veiled shields for bigotry and HATE. Unwitting victims become martyrs for a cause they might never have championed, just as religion justified the Crusades, The Colonization of the Americas, the Inquisition, and all the Jihads in the world. We read about the Japanese Internment camps in WWII and wonder how backward we were back then, but even now there is plenty of evidence of how little progress we have made. People are people and evil is evil. Harming the innocent, regardless of who you are, is evil, and evil knows no boundaries so far as political lines separating countries, skin color, or heritage.
Many people in America are not evil, but there are plenty, and that can be said for all humanity, on a person by person basis.
