After the attack on the World Trade Center Towers but before any plans were finalized for dealing with the terrorists, I sat down to breakfast with my father.
I felt lost and frustrated that such a thing could happen in America and nothing was being done to make things right.
“Sometimes I think the only thing that will fix the Middle East,” I said to my Dad, “is to turn the whole region into radioactive glass.”
“Then we wouldn’t be any different from the terrorists,” he said. “Even worse.”
My Dad was a wise man, and history may mark him as prescient. The event brought out both the best and the worst in us. History will sort it out. But, to our small credit, we didn’t turn the Middle East into radioactive glass.
There are some who think that if we just killed off ALL the people on the globe the world to me a much better place to live …
A follow-up thought … It is always much easier to destroy something that is to build something.
Exactly, again! Convincing people that one’s irrational desires make more sense than their irrational desires works sometimes, but even those times rational desires are up against irrational ones, the slog is a long one.
Unfortunately.
An Army buddy of mine recommended a book once that I’ve never been able to relocate. I think it was called something like “In the Eye of the Egg” or some such. It was about a tour group viewing an energy source called the Egg. By some means I forget, people could control events by channeling the energy. A racist fellow had an educated African American fellow (one of two heros in the book) talking like a “darkie”. A Puritan woman removed the genitals from all people. As I recall, the two heros finally gain control by figuring out that events were controlled by individuals subconsciously imposing their biases on the group, using the energy of the Egg. Once they understood this, they were able to restore order to the world. I’m sure that is an inadequate synopsis of a book I read 40 years ago and didn’t realize would stick in my mind!
That written, people still think the world would be a better place if it matched their biases, hence a species doomed to endless conflict and tragedy.
Glad you shared this.
Btw, I would just say “that such a thing could happen,” instead of deed.
But people write differently.
That works. This post is heavily edited from a much longer piece. My intention was to focus on the idea of a barbarous retaliation using atomic bombs, which showed the state of my mind then. It shocks me that I ever thought such a thing, let alone spoke it out loud.
As for “deed”, it might suggest a good thing I suppose. “Good deed”. Those two words frequently come together, but “dastardly deed” also has currency.
The simple thing sounds better than deed there.
It seems important to you, so I changed it.
Actually, it reads better to me, too, now that I see it in context.