The Sheila Variations

Well said, Sheila. This is horribly painful to see--all these children, just little kids, for God's sake. For me, it is the same wound of 9/11, reopened by the same assailants. As I have said to you before, the lack of clarity and recognition of this threat in so many is difficult to understand. These are not people with whom we can debate, compromise, appease, or approach with "nuance." Those who can coldly shoot little children down are inarguably evil--not repressed, not victims, not rebels, not responding in the only way they have available to them--they are evil. This is an elusive and nebulous enemy. I pray the world has the necessary resolve to deal with them, and I pray for the families of the dead that they may find some way to go in life. When I think of my own son, the magnitude of this human loss is shattering.

DBW:

Cashel started school last week. The thought of ... I mean, my mind goes blank at the thought.

But there's something in me that needs to try to feel that pain, with those poor parents ... the parents who lost those 2 little girls in the picture I posted. I have tears in my eyes. I know i can't really understand, but I am doing my best.

I don't think the terrorists care about winning anymore. I think they just want to take down everyone else around them. I've got nothing to back this up. I just can't understand shooting children in the back ...

I've had it with the crying game, and the idea that being oppressed or persecuted excuses any and all acts of barbarism in the name of your cause. Feeling sorry for oneself never has good consequences, but when taken to this extreme the result is evil. Every world religion has its crazy fundamentalist fringe. The problem for modern Islam, and the rest of us, is that its insane fringe is no longer on the fringe.

Agree. There is no excuse ever for this sort of thing. Evil. Evil. Evil.

Sheila, I think you are onto something very important with your remark that, for the terrorists, this is no longer about winning but about taking as many people down as they can. I sense this, too, and the implications are almost too horrible to consider. We must forget about waging a "more sensative war" and all the attendent nonsense about negotiating or trying to appease the monsters who are all-too-willing to engage in these types of slaughters. They mean to kill us, as many as they can, reasons or no reasons.

We therefore should need no further reason to search out and kill them.