September 11, 2001 Dear Halfbakery folks: Provided I can log in, I'll leave one further comment under "God that is real" and then stop for now. As you probably imagine, it's one aspect of a terrible aftermath -- a multiple attack that has killed a lot of people who did not deserve to die. I cannot imagine what their families feel, but the world is now clearly worse than it was, and for the time being I can't summon my sense of humor or whimsy or intellectual venture. I believe several (horrible and sad) truths about events like this one:

*- Whoever destroyed all those lives in the airliner and the WTC was looking to provoke a war. *- A lot of people in the U.S. are already calling it a war, not thinking about how they are thus agreeing with the attackers (and accomplishing their purpose). *- Things are about to get a lot uglier in a lot of places worldwide; this kind of fanaticism spreads like a forest fire and produces extreme chain reactions. The ugliest reactions will probably come from people who spend their lives in search of targets, vengeance, and vindication -- and find only targets, not caring whether innocent people die.

I mourn that my nation will probably see an even worse period of internal xenophobia, jingoism, reactionary raving, and knee-jerk hatred than it did during the "gulf war" of 1990-91. Nothing I can say is likely to change that, so I'm clearing my bit of the bandwidth here for awhile.

Thank you for your freedom of thought and your valuable online companionship.

Good luck all, and take care.

With hope, best intentions, and the knowledge that those aren't enough,