As is obvious, words just aren't forthcoming these days. It's not for want of information, since there's an overabundance of that. And it's not for want of thinking or time for thinking, because no part of the day goes by without reminders of the horror and sadness. Yet I still just can't make sense of it all. I can't reconcile rooting out terrorists in Afghanistan while compounding the already desparate situation for the majority of people living there. I can't reconcile our wealth of information resources to explain Muslim beliefs and detail the geography and history of Afghanistan and Pakistan, while no such educational counterpart exists in those countries. But most of all I can't reconcile the terrorists' willingness to die, even while knowing well what it was like to live in America. How can we root out a terror that we can't explain and don't understand?
Following my earlier local donations, at this point I'm donating to CARE for their programs in Afghanistan, particularly the COPE Educational Project . Here in the homeland, as it's now called, I am supporting the Towers of Light proposal for twin, white beacons of light to be temporarily installed in Lower Manhattan as a memorial to the World Trade Center and the lives lost there.
And all the time I'll still be trying to understand.