TBT: "Blood Begets Blood" September 11, 2001 letter-to-the-editor

I wrote this letter to the Fort Collins Coloradoan on September 11, 2001 (it was published a few days later). With the 20th anniversary of the date coming up, and with our recent withdrawal from Afghanistan, I thought it would be interesting to repost it. I chose to post it today rather than on September 11 because there is a political nature to it, and I wanted to avoid the actual date out of respect for the families and friends of the victims.

I feel the same today about this as I did 20 years ago.

Blood Begets Blood

Ross Cunniff, September 11, 2001

My heart cried out for blood when I heard the news this morning.  Bloody vengeance against those who had committed this unspeakable crime against thousands of innocent people.  And my heart was not discriminating: it wanted vengeance against all, past, present, or future, who had terrorized the world through their words and deeds.  It echoed the sentiments of persecutors past who said, "Kill them all; God will know His own!"

But my heart was wrong.

As the true enormity of what had happened slowly soaked in, I had time to reflect upon the world in which we live, and how it got to be this way: violence-soaked, reeling from action to hideous reaction.  A seemingly endless list of battlefields presents a macabre parade of ongoing feuds to our TV-jaded eyeballs.  Iran.  Iraq.  Kosovo.  Northern Ireland.  Palestine.  Macedonia.  Chechnya.  Peru.  Somalia.  In all of these places hatred has burned for hundreds or thousands of years, with no end in sight.  I realized that if I started advocating knee-jerk violence, I would just be adding my own name to the sad cast of those sad theaters.

And worse - by bringing fire down upon the heads of terrorist enemies, we are giving them exactly what they want: glory and a martyr's death, to keep their cause alive for another millennium.  The same is true for our domestic terrorists who commit their crimes against our schools and workplaces: death is no deterrent, as many of them commit suicide at the end of their rampage.  And we grant them immortality through the endless recycling of pictures of their carnage and its aftermath.  We even blaze the criminals' names and faces onto the front page of our newspapers to provide inspiration for the next generation of killers.  I hope that we can deny those responsible the fame that they seek, and will do my best to support efforts to condemn them to anonymity.

So, I will attempt to step into the future with my head up.  Let us bury and mourn our dead, heal our injured, console the grieving, and let justice do its work, as frustratingly slow as that can be.  Let us do our best to fix any security flaws which may have allowed this to happen in the first place.  But most of all, let us rely on our personal faiths for comfort, inspiration, and guidance.  My prayers go out to the families and friends of the victims, and to our leaders, emergency workers, armed forces, and our children.  May God grant us all wisdom and healing, even if we may never find understanding.

 My heart cried out for blood.  Now it just cries.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

August 21, 2017 Total Solar Eclipse

Image
Like millions of other people, we went chasing the Great American Eclipse. We chose Nebraska, since everybody we knew was going to Wyoming, and the climate models suggested a good probability of clear weather. Our initial camp was at Lake McConaughy, which is just inside the line of totality. My sister Danielle and her husband Edward got there early to start scouting. Our plan was to check weather forecasts and then go mobile the day of the eclipse. The morning of August 19 I got up early and snapped this shot of the moon on its way to its date with destiny: Sunday morning we checked the forecasts. It was not looking good for Nebraska in general, but east-central Nebraska seemed better than western according to the forecasts. So we packed up camp and headed out to Camp Augustine, a Boy Scout camp near Grand Island, Nebraska: They had camping spots available, and a large field which would be good for observations. After a rather hot, muggy, sleepless night (dry camping wi
Read more

April 8, 2024 Total Solar Eclipse

Image
On April 8, 2024, a total solar eclipse crossed a huge swath of the United States. We had been planning a trip to see it ever since the August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse . Our chosen destination was at Chalk Bluff River Resort and Park , near Uvalde, Texas, due to statistical likelihood of clear skies in South Texas: The main attraction at Chalk Bluff is Nueces River and the the eponymous bluffs that rise above it: Chalk Bluffs The eclipse was widely publicized. Enough so that the state of Texas found it necessary to put warnings on its highway signs: Texas DOT warning sign Texas DOT warning sign We arrived at Chalk Bluff on April 6. As eclipse day approached, it became clear that the weather was not going to be our friend: NWS blended forecast for eclipse day So, what was originally going to be an "Eclipse expedition, with a possibility of some birding" became a "Birding expedition, with a possibility of seeing an eclipse". It is fortunate that we chose thi
Read more

Addendum - new vs. old Canon 100-400mm

Image
In my previous post on this lens, I used a 1.4x teleconverter on both lenses.  I got a request to repeat the test without the teleconverters, so here are the results. These are all shot at ISO 400, f/5.6 at 400mm, 1/1600s, autofocus with the center point, RAW.  It is later in the day, and it looks like light clouds and shadows moving in the breeze are slightly changing the lighting between the shots, so caveat emptor.  First the whole image with the old lens: Next, the new lens: Here are the locations of the crops I took: First, the center crop.  The old lens: The new lens - again, sharper even in the center (although the moving shadows from the windy day make it a little harder to tell): The left edge crop, the old lens: The new lens - significantly sharper: And now, the corner crop, the old lens: And the new lens.  It is no contest: The chromatic aberration is not as bad with the old lens without the teleconverter - but the sharpness i
Read more