Lovely piece by my son, Will.

I was with you until the third paragraph from the end. But I'm having a weird afternoon. And some thing there caught me and I wrote what follows instead of what I was going to write. It's a doomsday lecture, so don't go any farther unless you can handle that. But your article caught me somehow, because I don't usually write scenarios like the one that follows. But bear with me if you dare:

I can't agree about having to strike back although I would proably be there standing in line. But I had no TV that day and never saw it happen except in reruns.

I think I'll stand, just for today, with the old conservative Albert Jay Nock who would have not condoned meeting violence with violence as I believe that such behavior always begets more violence and thus it creates a never ending cycle that will never allow our genes to develop into the peaceful men that we might could eventually evolve to if we had the sheer will power of people who embraced pacifism with great lust, like Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day and at times a few of our Christian denominations such as the Quakers and the Amish and the Mennonites and Church of the Brethren and Tolstoy and a host of others who embraced, at least at times, a pacifist world view.

And of course Christ, although even he could get a little testy when it came to moneychangers of the temple and thus doesn't quite meet my test for a true pacifist.

Pacifist literature was banned in Nazi Germany and Fasist Italy and Woodrow Wilson also did something to that effect. But America has changed since WWII as Roosevelt had trouble getting Americans excited enough to bring together the American people to support the fight in Europe. And no one knows, but the way of pacifism could lead to destruction for every society that embraces it.

But I believe the opposite of pacifism ultimately does so as well.

Which doesn't make me someone who's hopeful about the long term survival of the human species. A police action might have worked but I'm not sure we have enough men of the moral caliber to even do that without there ultimately being violence inflicted upon those who started the whole thing, which may be lost to history as the beginning of what happened that day may go back thousands of years. We really don't know if our genes are programmed to remember the past as our brains cannot know what our genes contain and how our genes control what we think.

But I know that pacifism couldn't occur here in America, not now, and I know I'm weak too. I'd surely succumb to the lust for revenge myself if placed in the right circumstances, in fact I think I surely would. But in some ways we have learned a valuable lesson as to the economics of revenge and I think we're learning it now and will continue to do so, whether it's engineered as Naomi Klein espouses or whether it's just something we did to ourselves and that we are still not through with.

In the long term I guess that makes me the ultimate pessimist as I believe that our ultimate fate will be that of Ozymandius. Assuming the descendants of the ants or the cockroaches or whatever creature survives us in the short term has the ability to think about us when we ultimately destroy ourselves which I believe will happen in the long term.

And when the suns die out I don't know whether there will be anything left at all except perhaps the transcendentalism that I can only dream will be there.

But I will embrace your post on another day I am sure. But as Emerson said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and I am not the man I was yesterday nor will I be the man I am today when tomorrow comes. (Dum Spiro Spero) So I'll reread it another day and when that day comes I'll agree. But today is not that day.

But I'm sure that many, many people will agree with you. Because until that third paragraph from the end I was with you. But this afternoon I'm a pacifist and a doomsdayer , but I'm a weak man and I won't be here long. Perhaps I'll wake up tomorrow and get through that first sentence in the third paragraph from the end that held me up.

Buck, I'm a little more hopeful, though I share many of your concerns. This instinct to hit back can be controlled, I believe. More dangerous is the urge to hit first and decisively, born from fear and weakness (of the mind).

Oh, I'm a little more hopeful too. But sometimes I'm just naturally a stir the pot kind of guy. Because it's fun when a whole bunch of people get together and throw out thoughts and we can sort through it all and everyone ends up better off in the thinking department if they are so inclined.

But I reread the last sentence in Will's post again just now and I'm liking his article more and more. Because I see if you look hard at that last sentence in the article, you might come to the conclusion that maybe the writer meant for that sentence to convey more than one meaning. Or maybe he didn't.

And I don't want to know whether he did or not because I'm fine with not knowing the answer to that question. Because if you don't know, it can be interpreted to contain a great thought, no matter whether you live here or you live in Timbuktu. Therefore you might have something in that last sentence that is intentionally or unintentionally misunderstood, but can be used for good whoever you are and wherever you stand.

I get misunderstood often but Emerson said something in the essay Self Reliance about people who are misunderstood and I've always liked that thought. Not that I could live up to it. I had an English teacher in tenth or eleventh grade that caught me captivated by that part of that essay and I've been captivated by it since.

And I might be misunderstanding Will's last sentence in his article. And I might not be. But that last sentence has got that something that Emerson was talking about when he talked about being misunderstood. And I see it now. You might have already seen and I just missed it before.

But maybe I'm just dense and it took me longer to get the point.

"But for now, blasted and bleak, it serves as a reminder of the evil that inspired the attack."

And of the evil that manipulated the aftermath of the attack.

The correct response has still not occurred. This was a criminal act which requires murder charges to be brought, against Osama bin Laden if he is the primary suspect, and/or all others who collaborated in the planning or execution of this act. A grand jury has not been impaneled for this purpose. Charges have not been filed. When?