Jason probably covered things more cogently than I could hope to in his entry below. I woke up early this morning and read the news at home (usually I do it at work). I was going to close the window to Slashdot when I saw the top story about London, and was basically left dumbstruck for about thirty seconds, while I worked on composing my first clear thought, which, I believe, was “holy shit.”

In the field I work in, we hear a lot about the awful things that happen overseas. My organization is currently heavily involved in a couple projects in Gaza and Israel, where bombings are a way of life. A friend of mine was, until recently, doing humanitarian work in Afghanistan; just the other week I got a long email from him about his experiences when a friend and colleague of his was kidnapped (she made it home safely in the end).

Bad things happen all the time.

I lived in the UK for six months during my junior year of college, and towards the end of that time, I spent several days in London. The hostel I stayed at was just across the street from King’s Cross, which was very close to two of the bomb sites. London’s always been one of my favorite cities, even before I had visited it. I grew up reading Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie novels; London was real to me in a way that say, New York has never been.

Two of my close friends are doing graduate work at Oxford; I had dinner with one of them last night, so I knew she wasn’t near the city. My first non-expletive-laden thought was to send the other an email to make sure she was all right. I heard back from her in late morning, saying that she and her husband had been in Oxford, and so far, nobody they knew had been hurt. She ended her email with “it always makes one think about everything,” which I suppose seems obvious, but it doesn’t make it any less true. I remember September 11th vividly, as I’m sure all who experienced it do, and early this morning, the CXM news post I wrote on that day came to mind. The things I said there apply just as much today as they did almost four years ago, though I wonder if we’ve really been making the right choices as a country.

This morning, I felt as if a black cloud was hanging over my head, mostly for other, more personal reasons. The fact that I was waiting to hear back from people just made it worse, and I didn’t feel like doing much of anything, though I was forced to sit through an hour and forty-five minute meeting. Somewhere in there, my mind wandered off, and I found myself thinking over choices I had made, and those that lay in my future, and whether or not I had made the right ones to that point. I’m still thinking about it.

Like Jason said, I’m not sure whether or not I have a vague responsibility to write about the events in London on our piddling little blog with the silly name. But I too have been holding back on a post I wrote this morning, feeling that I couldn’t write about stupid little things without addressing the elephant in the room. It’s not necessarily a question of propriety as much as what was really going through my head at the time.

I was going to say that I don’t care what anybody else says, it is never justified to kill people in order to prove a point. I still believe that, but I also recognize the difficulties in saying it when I live in a country that is currently engaged in killing people in order to prove a point.

Wasn’t it so much easier when we were kids, and the bad guys in cartoons would openly declare their evil intentions (which were nearly always for the sake of being evil)? Nobody ever felt sympathetic to Cobra Commander’s plight, or wondered if Megatron had just made bad life choices. But people are rarely that simple. It’s easy to villanize, but it’s just as easy (and naive) to heroify.