By Chaz Martin

Why in the sam hell was the phone ringing at 9:17 in the morning? I didn’t have class until the afternoon, and was soaking up a few extra hours of sleep. And so, as I wiped the dreams out of my eyes and prepared to scream at a telemarketer, I picked up the receiver and heard my mother’s voice shaking. I slammed down the phone and flipped the television to the only station that I receive, and I saw it. Through the half-snow of Channel 32, I picked out a fire and a city and people running down boulevards. The news anchor was in existential despair, and as he reported the surreal happenings of this dawn, he seemed to be giving birth to a new world where wickedness and violence are rights of passage.

And I thought about the violence that is greeted upon waking in the Congo and in Kashmir and in Palestine, in the every morning that brings fear with sunrise. Missiles sail over barbed wire to protect the just, before rocks are thrown in reply to defend the righteous. And the cycle churns on, and children learn, and man’s need to bed with violence is given urgency. And only now, as my eyes are fixed to images of the unreal city, under the brown fog of a winter dawn, do I realize that until now, I had not thought death had undone so many.

Americans, most of whom are great leagues from New York, have reeled from loss with a distinct pain that hovers above the pancreas: a loss of innocence, a loss of safety. We have rallied under an idea: love of country, because “They can’t do that to Americans. They can’t do that here. They will see what happens when they mess with the United States.”

Flags will lie over coffins and hang from doorways. Flags will be lifted high, inspiring citizens to defend their land. Flags will be cried upon. Flags will be died upon… in Afghanistan, as well as in this grieving nation. The banners of all nations at war will be used to cover the wounded spirit, in an effort to attach some semblance of goodness and nobility to chaos.

If waving a flag gives you peace, then by all means, carry it with you. I cannot right now. I am too busy trying to comprehend what it means to take away a spark of life; my mind is filled with faces extinguished. All emotional reserves have been allotted to the window washers, college kids, stock brokers, waiters, tourists from Iowa, people paying their rent, fire fighters, kids taking a plane trip for the first time, mothers, salesmen: who won’t have the chance to write bad poetry or get a silly tattoo. He won’t be able to drink a beer this Thursday at 6:00 like he does every week. She won’t be able to ask out the guy that she was starting to dig. He won’t be able to make amends with his father. All of the collective things that were going to happen, will not happen. The world is lessened immeasurably, and nothing can ever restore the mundane, yet chocolate rich reality that would have been.

And so it comes back again and again to the questions of why, and of the good and dark forces we struggle within. The newspaper headline before me reads “Bush tours New York carnage; vows to rid the world of evil.” The highjackers who killed thousands were trying to do the very same. When one believes that a given people can carry absolute truth, the sole harbingers of a dominant paradigm, then any action that they commit is deemed justifiable. When violence is a tool to achieve the sublime, the forces of dark and light become intertwined and indistinguishable.

I do not know whether or not we should bomb Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden must be brought to justice, but besides that, the question is one of necessary evils. Killing a human being is the most repugnant act that can ever be done. It is wrong, for any reason, in any circumstance, for any cause. To erase the life of another is permanent and unjustifiable. The hatred that is spawned from murder feeds on itself and consistently proves to be an voracious, self-generating beast.

If violence is employed as a means to peace, it is my only prayer that it is decisive, but merciful.

It is the morning of tomorrow that must be nursed and tended to. Perhaps, we may hope, the pandemic violence created by inequality and mistrust will be looked upon with a cold evaluation, with objective discussion of the American place as a peacemaker, and of how well we live up to that designation. The life that is gone is gone because hatred has driven many on this planet insane, desperate, and absolute in belief. We must strive today to open dialogue and free our ideas from petty nationalism, making real effort to finally, oh finally, lay down both sword and flag to warmly embrace our brothers and sisters on this one, nurturing earth.

Chaz Martin is a senior history major and a columnist for The Louisville Cardinal.