A New Day Dawns After Another Night of Terror

The murdering terrorist yelled, “Allahu Akbar,” Arabic for God is great.

A son weeped over the body of his mother, a Muslim, one of the first people drilled down, and asked Allah to please accept his mother into heaven.

An ambulance, red lights shining a beacon of hope for the injured, stops and asks, “Where are the wounded?”

“We only have dead here,” was the response.

This morning I woke to the photo of a doll laying on the street next to the body of what appears to be a child. The body is covered with a gold looking sheet that police use to protect the privacy of the dead and the heart of the onlooker.

But there is no way to protect the hearts of the people who were killed, or the people who lost loved ones, or us, the people of a world, who have lost, too.

I had just sat down and flipped on the television after a day of thinking and writing. I wanted to watch something that cleared my brain, something easy and light.

For some reason, the television was on a news station. “Thirty dead,” I saw.

“Oh no, not again,” I thought.

I could have changed the station and found something else to watch, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. There are times when I think, “Ok. I have had enough of this. Another day. More people killed,” and carry on. If we stop to mourn every killing, even just in this country, our days would be shot. But there is something in me that makes me feel like I need to see and feel a bit of this terror that other people are experiencing, to pay a strange, long distance respect. Maybe it is me showing what solidarity I can.

So I watched. The scene of the truck and people running, looped and looped. Reporters scrambled to get eyewitnesses to talk. Information was scarce, but we all knew the plot. A different day, another town, same story.

People who hate kill people who want to live.

It isn’t just Christians who are being slaughtered. It is Muslims, Jews, Catholics, men, women, children. It isn’t a matter of religion. It is hatred that has been pushed to the point of insanity.

The terrorist, from what I read, was from Tunisia, but life in Nice. He walked among these people he slaughtered.

As in other times in history, people have been trained to hate.  The difference was, the haters wore uniforms of one sort or the other, declaring and alerting people to their allegiance.

Today’s terrorist don’t do that. They wear no guise. Their beastly, hate-filled heart is covered in clothes that any of us swear. They walk beside us, and plan ad stalk like jaguars and then, when the time is right, when they decide who their “soft targets” are going to be, they hit.

We aren’t supposed to profile, but Lord knows the terrorists are profiling us. They are sizing us up and deciding where they can do the most damage.

While listening to news last night, one of the presidential candidates said we have to be tough and strong. Oh, and smart. There were calls by some to declare war. And this is a war.

But after the strong talk, then what? How do we root out evil?

There isn’t an easy answer.

There’s just not an easy answer.

And it all just makes me sick.