After the Smoke Has Gone

Oh my God! That's what they all say. Oh my God! Oh my God! After a lifetime of denial or indifference suddenly one finds faith. Oh my God! Confronted with the enormity of evil and the certainty of death, when no one else will answer, when no one else will do, we make our final desperate plea to our mysterious disregarded father. We are experiencing an epiphany, a sudden suspension of disbelief. And we all say the same thing, don't we? Sooner or later we all say the same thing.

Last night I watched them fall again. I watched the buildings fall. Why now, why, when confronted with the certainty of my own demise am I drawn once again to pay homage to this ghastly funeral pyre? Why resurrect the pain? The awful deed has been done. The smoke has cleared. Why do I feel this almost sacred need to relive it? Perhaps it is because of that dramatic and unequivocal title, which I suspect is somehow false and inappropriate: "102 Minutes That Changed America". Perhaps it is because I fear that America has not really changed. Not really. Not enough. The awful deed has been done. The smoke has cleared. And we have moved on. Life must go on, we tell ourselves. Once again we have withdrawn into the convenient comfort of our intellectual hubris. We have assigned the great event to history, where it sits unobtrusively on the shelf with all of those other omnipotent but disregarded historical events. And we have moved on.

But have our enemies moved on? Have our enemies forgotten us? Abandoned their murderous mission? Or are they patiently waiting for us to forget them? Counting on our notoriously short attention span? Do they know us better than we know them? Than we know ourselves? Has our anger and our fear dissipated with the smoke?

Here, once again, for those who doubt our mortal peril, we revisit the awful event. Can we still cry? Can we still call out, Oh my God!? - rg

-----------------------------------------------

A Candle For The Darkness

by Roger W. Gardner

I acknowledge my deep appreciation to all of those photographers whose work I have used for this essay. I can only hope that they would approve.

Note: Best viewed on IE in full screen.

Something is happening...

Something is happening here...

something bad is happening...

people are running...

running for their lives...

they're falling from the sky...

the buildings are falling...

the buildings are gone.

Everything gone.

All those people.

Gone.

Where are you?

What do I do
without you?

Why me?
Why us?
Why now?

Why us?

We must all come together now as one.
We must embrace one another in our mourning.

We must search our souls for answers.
But first we must mourn...

Of course...

not everyone is in mourning...

in fact...







some people...

seem pretty happy...

about the whole thing,
don't they?

Then again...
there are those who say...

that we deserved it.

That we had it coming.

They say, that by fighting back,
by going to war...

we're just making everything...

worse.

And sometimes it does seem...












as though every day...

more and more people...

hate us.

Maybe if we just...

kind of...








ignored it...

or...

maybe if we..

just lit a candle...

if we lit a whole bunch of candles...

we could drive away the darkness.

My friends...

this is the darkness.

And this is the candle.

voted by Gop Hub