Innocence lost!

It is a quiet Saturday morning here in southern Illinois as we sit down at our word processor to pen this piece. As we think back, it was just eleven years ago this day, also a Saturday back then, that we borrowed our then second wife’s car to make a trip down to Nashville, Tennessee to see a display of artifacts that had been brought up from the bottom of the Atlantic ocean at the Titanic wreck site. We have written about this before so we will not dwell on it any further except to note that the reason that we remember the date was because it was just three days later that ours and most everyone else’s world changed when the horrible attack on the World Trade Center towers descended this nation into a time of shock and grief and depression that we have seldom ever seen in this nations history.

And so, here we are, a scant three days away from another anniversary of this event that has so scarred and changed us as a people, a nation, and a world.

We don’t know why, but, we cannot help but think back on Osama bin Laden, the force that placed into motion this time of troubles that has not really ever left us and probably never will leave us in the lifetime of those of us who had the misfortune of getting to sit in front of our television sets and watch what this Saudi Arabian man was responsible for. We have been discussing hate lately as it pertains to the members of the Republican party as it pertains to president Barack Obama. And, we wonder if that is any greater hate than they have for bin Laden! Can one ever measure the dimensions of hate? There are those alive and well in this world who will tell us that the bin Laden event was very useful for the cause of the right and that they willingly allowed the strike on the trade towers to happen just to further their cause. This is a thought that is abhorrent to most people. However, there are still those who espouse this line of thinking around the United States and around the world. It is unacceptable to some that a group of nineteen mostly Saudi Arabian men could take over four commercial aircraft and do the things that they did just eleven years ago come Tuesday. Bin Laden himself admitted that he had himself cut the number of aircraft hijackings down from eight to four because he felt that eight would be far too easy to detect. After the attacks, bin Laden and his associates expressed about as much surprise as the rest of the world that the aircraft that they flew into those towers did as much damage as they inflicted. The only difference between bin Laden and the rest of the world was that he was delighted at what happened. To this man, it was a very pleasant surprise!

They say that the line between love and hate and genius and insanity is all too often a thin one and can be crossed and recrossed many times across a lifetime, or, just perhaps, many lifetimes. Hate is a terrible emotion and feeling and it destroys if it is allowed to persist most decency and judgment that exists in those who possess it. Osama bin Laden was a supposedly charismatic and cool character who gave, as most leaders of his type do, meaning to lives who have never had any such thing in their existence before. It is uncomprehending to most sane people how individuals can sacrifice their lives just to take the lives of others who usually are completely innocent of whatever it is that drives these people to do what it is that they do. American soldiers serving across the middle east have seen the results of these suicide attacks and many Americans have either come home in body bags or so badly scarred in body and often in soul that their own worlds are forever altered as they attempt to find some new reality to grasp hold of in the face of what has happened to them. In the culture and ethos of the western world, a soldier who sacrifices his life in the service of his country and most particularly when they help to save the lives of others is held in among the highest of regards of any human beings that have ever lived. In the United States, we award the Congressional Medal of Honor to those who, in over ninety percent of the cases, are never alive to know that they received the award. Across much of the Arab culture, to die to punish others for whatever sin that they have committed is, in their belief system anyway, a sure ticket to paradise. The nineteen men who died on September eleventh, 2001, went out the night before and celebrated what was about to happen to them as they were told that many virgins would be awaiting them in that paradise. No one ever returns from death so there is really no way to know which belief system is right and which is wrong, or, if we should even be looking at it in that sort of respect. All most of us know is the fact that three thousand mostly American citizens went about their own business that same night before totally unaware of what was going to happen to them twelve hours or so later on a beautiful Tuesday that would become ingrained in our consciousness for at least a generation to come. Some ate, some slept, some made love to their lovers or simply held them tight in the manner of those that do that sort of thing. None of them knew that it was the last time that they would ever get the chance to experience these so very human things.

When we think back on the Titanic story, she was destroyed by the greed of corporations and their masters who saw nothing ahead but more and more profit and who did not bother to take into account that fifteen hundred souls would be lost in the process of achieving that goal. When we look back on Pearl Harbor we think of all the soldiers lost there as a new war was announced with the savagery and surprise that changed a world for all of those alive at that time. When we look back on September eleventh in the coming years we think, despite what we might want to believe, of what a single individual can do to destroy a world that perhaps did not deserve what came its way. We killed Osama bin Laden as we, as president Obama said in regard to the killing of innocent people: “We will pursue you to the ends of the earth!� But still, all of the innocents are gone, and, so sadly so much of our innocence is gone just as well. Each generation, it seems, must face its loss of innocence and September eleventh is what destroyed ours. And, as we look into the eyes of those who fought Hitler during World War Two who went through the death camps at the end of that time, we see a passage of something from generation to generation that only things like what have happened in these special and horrible times such as September eleventh can buy for us. And, the cost is so terribly and irretrievably high because lost innocence is such a precious gift that can never be bought back.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.