From Beauty in Brooklyn to Blood in London

Last night I walked along Brooklyn's Seventh Avenue with my friend Shubh Mathur, both of us enjoying the beautiful clean breezy evening, the street lights playing on the neighborhood scene, and the aftermath of a wonderful dinner at Thai Rice Kitchen. Shubh is happy to be leaving NYC and beginning a new chapter of her life as a teacher at New London's Connecticut College. What happened in old London this morning probably only makes her more eager to depart big city life, however charming Brooklyn can be.

News is still breaking but old memories of September 11th horrors return. God, "when will we ever learn, when will we ever learn"? Air America Radio has just cut away to Bush talking about human rights and human liberty and caring deeply and about people killing innocent people and about how he believes in compassion. Oh, God -- he doesn't see the irony in his words. He's killed at least 25,000 Iraqis directly in military actions, wrecked their infrastructure and spewed depleted uranium, with its ensuing health problems and birth defects, all over their county. London suffers. New York has suffered. But the innocents of Iraq, who had nothing to do with 9/11 and who did not have weapons of mass destruction (and Bush knew, he knew -- see the Downing Street Minutes a/k/a Memo and related material) have suffered, and are suffering, and will suffer. Did we truly expect that the perpetrators of unprovoked violence (I mean "us" -- US and Britain) to remain unscathed? Please. It is the vicious cycle of violence, the chicken hawks coming home to roost. That does not excuse the violence, the killing, the destruction, the terrible hurt in London. It explains it. Or begins to explain it.

The odd irony in my life is that I work with ex-FBI and ex-CIA in my corporate existence. Ex-CIA agent Norb admired my "No War on Iraq" button so many months ago and, reminding me that he had worked in the Middle East, told me that he agreed with it and that he couldn't sleep just contemplating a war in Iraq. To paraphrase him, "I know the Middle East minds. If you think that bombing Afghanistan was a recruitment tool for Osama bin Laden -- and it was, I don't want to even think what will happen if we go into Iraq." I gave him my button. But the war began. And the vicious cycle of violence continues.

"Those responsible have no respect for human life," Tony Blair said minutes ago. But we do? Iraqi lives are human lives. Palestinian lives are human lives. American lives are human lives. English lives are human lives. Israeli lives are human lives. Enough. Indeed, too much. "An eye for an eye makes everybody blind." Oh, God help us to remember what Thomas Merton said, "The God of Peace is never glorified by human violence." Whoever the perpetrator, it is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Now, more than ever, truly, we need....

Peace hugs,
Kate Anne