EMAIL HIM

His Philosophy

World War III

The first thing to do here is give a sincere thanks to the volunteers up in Manhattan now busting their asses, some of them doing 24 hour shifts, some of whom were reported to have worked non-stop for DAYS since 9/11 until the sheer exhaustion forced them to take a break. These people are demonstrating tremendous Soul to counter the soulless mass-murders that took place.

I've been trying to write this damn thing for a week. It's just damn hard to write anything about this, and I want you all to know I'm taking so long because I'm trying to write with the utmost respect for the deceased, and for the country.

The Peter Ganci (New York fire chief) funeral on Saturday just broke me and made the whole thing sink in. I hadn't really dealt with the thing in any real way until Saturday. I've talked about it, thought about it, swore about it, drank about it, and burned my brains on television, which I'm sure a lot of you are doing. I've been watching and listening to non-stop news since the damned thing happened.

But still, this whole damned thing is too much to bear.

Reading through what I wrote on Tuesday about this attack, I know that my original article was too objective, too withdrawn because on Tuesday September 11, 2001, I really didn't TRULY believe what happened.

I KNEW it happened. I perceived it, and did not deny its truth, but I didn't really believe it. A belief is not simply a perception of fact, or the opposite of one opinion, or the taking of one preconceived side. It's something known not by the mind but by the blood. The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks sunk into the mind, but not the blood. Something like this registers as a dream. I told Joann I'd wake up Wednesday, and it would feel like a bad dream. Then after becoming more awake, I'd know it was reality. That's exactly what happened Wednesday morning, although I slept in insomniatic cat naps (which happens to me when the brain won't shut down properly), and the same thing happened Thursday and Friday. But no more.

Here's what I wrote Tuesday, about what I saw:

"I walked up the streets of Chapel Hill today, and really, it seemed like some sort of dream. I had Dan Rather on the Walkman and was going up to meet Joann for lunch. I passed the Army/Navy surplus store, who were quick to put the flag at half mast and there were some army dudes in the doorway smoking and having what looked like a heated discussion. I made eye contact with most passersby and in every eye was the same look: uncertainty, and worry."

Images like the ones we've been seeing on TV were, until Tuesday, tucked away in the basements of our minds, only surfacing in rare contemplation of Nuclear War and Apocalypse. Images of the planes crashing into these enormous monuments to Power, photos of people jumping to their deaths from 100 stories high; sounds, audible images of blood curdling screams of horror, people wildly stampeding through the streets, running for their lives like something out of a Godzilla movie, businessmen who narrowly escaped, looking like ghosts, covered in ash and soot with briefcase still in hand, containing the documents which are the ghosts of a once powerful business, gripping their workday luggage like the last shred of normalcy they can hold, asking "What am I supposed to do now?", the victims' families walking around with ghostly images in their hands, pleading and hoping for a snowball's chance in hell in utter insanity, firefighters raising the American Flag, just like Iwo Jima.

I now know how my grandparents' generation felt after Pearl Harbor. I'm not sure if my grandfathers were drafted to fight in the Second World War, but if they did volunteer, I sure as hell can understand why. (Both fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and my dad's father ended up in a prison camp for a long while before the end of the war.) The necessity of war was something up until now, my generation couldn't really perceive in any honest way, nor could my parents' generation. This is the first, absolutely necessary war since World War II. And, the United States entered the Second World War over the much less damaging attack on Pearl Harbor than the one on 9-11-01 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

This may be humanity's last war. It's going to be a thousand times worse than Spielberg's depiction of Normandy, which is the only thing that I have to compare. World War III will be a war of skin-melting chemicals, and most likely, a nuclear bomb or two somewhere. And I don't believe it'll be as quick as the Gulf War either. Thanks to Iran-Contra, Middle Eastern countries have been trading high tech arms, including some nukes, like goddamn pogs since the 80s. From now on, everything changes.

This attack was the bastard child of religious fanaticism. If those guys didn't believe in Heaven and Hell and God and Satan, chances are the Empire State Building wouldn't be the tallest building in New York today. Who knows, maybe if they were atheists or agnostics they would've still done it. But I'm willing to put money on the fact that if it weren't for groups of people thinking they were God's chosen ones, we'd all be better off. The Middle East, Ireland, the United States, the whole God-damned-to-death lot of us.

Conflicting reports are everywhere. I just heard today that one of the hijackers on the list released by the FBI is alive and well and living in Afghanistan. I hope they explored the remote possibility that the hijackers may have used fake names. But who the hell knows the whole story? No one. Don't believe everything you see on the news. All I know is, last time someone surprise-attacked the USA in a kamikaze fashion, thousands of people and their children died. So don't fuck with us.

Even if Bin Laden didn't orchestrate the WTC and Pentagon bombings (yep, those planes were really big bombs), he's been fucking with us for long enough, or so we've been told. He supposedly did the USS Cole bombing, and he's been talking shit for long enough about killing Americans. I was listening to the BBC yesterday while washing dishes, and one Afghani said, and I quote, "I will kill all the Americans."

So fuck them. Let's go to war with Afghan and the Taliban. We need an identifiable enemy - might as well be Bin Laden and the Taliban: a bunch of psycho-religious dickheads. Until all the FBI evidence is in, let's just start by bombing those bastards.

All of this will only affect us more and more. I'm as thirsty for revenge as anybody, but I have a few good good buddies, old neighborhood friends in the military: one in the Army and one in the Air Force Reserves. And probably more I haven't seen since high school. I'm worried about all of them.