London Again

The news caught up with me in the waiting room of a hospital lab. I was floating in a haze of weariness and medication and waiting for a totally indifferent lab tech to take several vials of blood from me to run some obscure and possibly meaningless test when I realized what the almost inaudible CNN report was saying.

It wasn't a rehash of two weeks ago and the horrible losses. It was a new attack on London. I flashed back immediately to the gentler of the two security men at Gatwick when we were getting ready to leave England the day after the original attacks. We were talking with a familiarity based soley in the fact that both our nations had been attacked by cowards and extremists, and I remember him saying, "It's not over yet. They'll attack again. It's just beginning."

I hate that we live in a world that proved him right. How is it that life has become so appallingly cheap? Why have we lost the ability to look at another human being, no matter what he or she believes or looks like or speaks, and see him or her as an entity of worth? There is some fundamental part of our humanity that seems on the verge of extinction.

How God must weep when he looks at us. The clever brains he gave us get more and more efficient at creating new ways to cleave and rend our brothers and sisters. Our deft fingers fashion new and more horrible tools of destruction. Why? Why do so many chose the path of hatred?

I can't understand how those suicide bombers could get on their chosen targets, be it a London tube or an American 747, look around them at the parents holding the hands of their children, the young people commuting to work or school, the grandparents traveling to see their families, and believe, even for a moment, that their religion or their politics justifies their actions.

The response to this is going to be the tired and rather convenient old cliche, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Doesn't that just make everything okay? Isn't that just the perfect justification? "In my world view, it's okay for me to kill, so everybody should just get over it." It's crap. The most valuable thing in the whole world is life. It's the one thing we can't simulate or synthesize in the lab. Additionally, how in the world does killing commuters on a London subway forward the cause of liberty or statehood? After all, the whole world backs, nay cherishes, those who randomly, rabidly kill anyone who is handy. Everybody jumps on board to champion, support, and aid those whose goal is to spread terror and hate.

I know I'm an idealist. I claim it and the evitable disappointment that comes with it. I have to believe that we as a species are capable of more. I have to believe that someday we will want more. I have to believe that the majority of the world DOES want more right now. If I don't believe that, I don't think I can go on. I have to believe that the darkness won't win. The day I begin to believe that it will, that there is no way for the dreams of peace and sanity to prevail, is the day that I will become, at least tacitly, a part of the problem.

I'm not a Pollyana. Realistically, I know that I live in an age that will probably see acts much more heinous than those of New York, Madrid, or London. I don't know what the solution is. God didn't give me that wisdom. All I can do is try my best to always "see" the people around me and encourage people in whatever impossibly small way I can to do the same.