When I was young, I was afraid of nothing, I was reckless and free. I had no knowledge or experience of fear. I look back now and reflect that I lived a charmed existence and I think that the old saying about the Lord watching over drunks and fools must be true.
But nothing stays the same forever and one day a change came into my life. I learned to know the face of fear. From the moment that my first child was born, I have been held captive to my fear. I have learned to cope but fear always lies just below the surface. All it takes is for just one of my children to be as little as twenty minutes late and my mind runs over various scenarios, all frightening, all brutal. My imagination seems to know no limits, nor my fears.
Like so many others I have been held captive by the Russian School Siege. Neither my children nor my love ones are held hostage in this fear or grief but I am unable to look upon the images of these children and their families and remain calm and detached. I have cried myself a river reading Logic & Sanity’s translations of the drama.
In the days and weeks to come there will be many stories published and much analysis offered. All possible root causes will be held up to the light of day. Blame will be assigned liberally around to all but in this whole monstrous saga the one thing I have yet to hear or read in Canada is; why we will not call a spade a spade? These people were not militants, or rebels, nor heroes of a revolution. These are not the modern Minute Men and this was not the Alamo. This outrage was an act of extreme terror perpetrated against the most innocent and vulnerable members of any society.
This was planned, designed and implemented with only one objective: to perpetrate terror, death and grief to the greatest number possible. There was no reasonable objective or hope that this outrage would lead to anything other than to manufacture mayhem and destruction. The intended consequences were to cause acute anguish and set in motion a million new fears. This is the face of terrorism and those who commit such acts of senseless barbarism are terrorists.
I realize that my countrymen are a smug lot. We think that it could never happen here, we are just too nice and our very niceness will insulate us from harm. We are not Americans or Israelis, or even Russians. We are a nation without sin, and yet, how long will the bubble last as long as we refuse to acknowledge that the infectious ideology that preaches terror and death as a tool of social engineering remains unacknowledged in our midst?
3 comments:
Over on my blog i put a comment regarding googling news of the horrible goings on in Russia. Yesterday, terrorist+russia+canada turned up reports from China and Russia for instance. militant+russia+canada turned up ctv. Canada has a big big problem, we are living in a bubble that will inevitably burst one day. God help us if the U.S. won,t be there to defend us, because we surely won't be able to do it ourselves, especially since the Libs seem to have the goal of disarming all but criminals and terrorists in the country.
Certainly when the bubble bursts the CBC will be wringing its hands and moaning, "how could this happen?".
No, it will be much worse because of entrenched self-hating leftist thought, the national consensus will be - it is all our fault, if only we were more sensitive to the needs of minorities this would not have happened. - Remember our former pm on the 1st anniversary of 9/11? He blamed American arrogance for 9/11.
Thank you for putting this feeling into words. I've rappelled out of buildings, I've been keelhauled behind a boat, I've ridden helicopters flying so low we were dodging trees. There were times when I was scared, but in an exhilarating way.
I didn't know true fear until I had kids. Gut-wrenching, debilitating fear that strangles every other thought or emotion.
Beslan is the realization, the incarnation of that fear for hundreds of parents. I cannot fathom how they are dealing with this nightmare come to life. Like you, all I can do is cry.
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