Can we understand?

Can we understand? you ask -

Understand this unbelievable thing?

Unbelievable?

This is what you hear now a few hours after in the midst of panic, grief, sorrow:

Unbelievable... incredible...couldn't believe my eyes...

Can we understand history now when we see it so clearly When it isn't at all old rhetoric in congresses and classrooms But the very mould it is made from?

When it gets a digital clearness,
Like a plane running into a high cardbox, filled with people

Prolonged, and shown again and again and again all over the world

The plane forever running into that World Trade Center, that is no more
Until it's almost emblematicly unreal and can't be talked of, only shown

Only shown: history will never end as it is also deep inside us

Can we understand?

In a sense we can understand very well, we're human beeings and this is what human beings have done in history - again and again and again

We can easily say: history is also grief, sorrow, tragedy, darkness, blood, of course it is

All what we normally have come to regard as entertainment, as a way of passing time,

For all we know those who did this could easily have got their scenario from Hollywood

It's ok as long as it isn't real, when it only tickles our senses of excitement and when there is a Mel Gibson or Tom Cruise or Indiana Jones to save us

Can we understand? you ask me again

Yes, we can. I'm sure this was bound to happen, according to history rules.

It has always happened, it always happens and this is a big, big time

very big now, which probably means it will get bigger in the future

This is in the big, modern world, everything done in a new scale

And it happened where it usually doesn't happen

It happened where you usually sit talking about it over a cup of coffee

This is not the Middle East, where things like this ought to happen

This is another east, the American east, the American heart

In what way does this deserve the headlines, the attention that was not given to the gassed people in a Kurdish village in northern Irak?

Is it only a matter of shock and surprise and the number of casualties or is it the fact that it happened in the heart of those who rule the world, not in any village in the margins of the world?

Of course it is

This is not to diminish the grief and sorrow

It can't be diminished

And it shouldn't be valued according to size scales

But there are different perspectives to everything, always

Isn't that one of the cornerstones in the free open world, that now is talking of terrible revenge

Can we understand? you ask -

Can we understand Wounded Knee, Guernica, the Blitz, Dresden, the Holocaust, the Gulag, Hanoi, Srebrenica, World Trade Center?

Can we understand?

This is our world, as it is...but still?