Maddening

I'm okay as well.

Had left London after a magically wonderful evening of Softball and cheap beer/wine the night before, circa 4AM, to wake up to greet my buddy's end of exams and hear this news.

A few thoughts.

(1) This is unsurprising, and could/will happen again. Anyone reading this blog could have pulled this off with little difficulty if they were so inclined. I don't mean that in the flippant sense, just in the "consequence of a free society" that Tim mentioned earlier. No one patted me down on the Tube or buses to check for bombs yesterday, and I don't anticipate that they will tomorrow. That's a good thing, as tremendously saddening as this was...

(2) How dare they.

London is THE multicultural city, the world's capital if you will. It's an overused expression, but Johnson's "If you are tired of London, you are tired of life" remains tellingly apt. Walking from Marble Arch down to the softball match last night through Hyde Park, I overheard at least 10 separate languages in the 20 minute stroll. To coordinate and excute such an assault, you have to be depraved/demented beyond compare. Tim's observation on the fact that they hit predominantly Muslim areas services the point - those organizing this don't really have a clue what they are doing, their only weapon the fact that they value other people's lives as little as their own.

(3) Bringing them to justice? Humpf. How do you fight an enemy that willingly dies in the attempt on "innocents"? The answer has to be, on some level anyway, that you seek out the reasons why ANY citizens of the world might feel compelled to do something like this, and attempt to consolidate/overthrow/rebut them. Let's not descend into partisanship re: Bush's tactics/rhetoric. But somewhere there are 5 year olds who are cheering these bombings and burning American flags. They need to be reached.

(4) I don't know the city of New York like I know London town. It's my defining city, where I feel absolutely at home abroad. An attack on it is a visceral stab that cuts deep. Maddening, and it puts the true magnitude of 9/11 into a deeper, absolutely depressing, framework.

(5) London remains dominant. It obviously transcends this, and will overcome. And I love it and its people all the more for it.