July 07, 2005   As is my habit, I checked the news before going to bed. What I read shocked me, but probably shouldn't have. Bombings in London, over 50 dead and hundreds injured. And an Egyptian diplomat in Iraq was executed.

It was difficult to deal with, to say the least, as I crawled into bed and watched the live tv coverage. "This is the world we live in now," my brain reminded my heart, which was just a subtle way of saying "suck it up and get used to it". Terrorism, insurgencies, jihads, this is our new lexicon, our new commonplace, our brave new world.

But I don't want this world, and I can't help but think that it's not of our making, that this is not what the average person around the world wants or would choose. A minority of people, religious and political extremists, have taken the reins and are running us straight for a cliff, or so it seems. It's hard to get a grasp on reality these days, to know what is true or which end is up.

Are we teetering on the brink of destruction or is this maddness and chaos just part of a cycle, the ebb and flow of humanity, an inevitable moral speedbump? Certainly the world has seen darker times than these and lived to tell about it, now if only we could learn from history and stop making the same mistakes over and over, in one form or another.

If nothing else, I just wish one crucial lesson could be learned, and that is that killing innocent people doesn't prove or solve anything, and it's always wrong. Leave the innocent and powerless out of it. Only pathetic cowards crucify the blameless. It's as simple as that. There's no excuse for killing innocent people.

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