Survey says, 66% of the US favors retaliation even if innocent people are killed.
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming
Can’t sleep. But I feel like I need to sit here and compulsively look at the photographs of the victims and their grieving families on TV. I don’t want to see any more victims; but I can’t look away. I haven’t watched anything but the news in days. I haven’t listened to music. What rough beast, indeed.
An editorial in The Guardian shows the other side of the machine at work. “Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment.” Is this the time for all the nations to close their borders and become selfishly nationalistic? As a liberal, I am distressed by the pointless liberal whining claiming that the US somehow caused this. Innocent private citizens cannot be made responsible for the assholes in charge, whether those assholes wear turbans or suits. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are filled with passionate intensity.”
