No humor column today.
I don't want to write it, and you don't want to read it.
No words of wisdom, either. I wish I were wise
enough to say something that would help make sense of this horror,
something that would help ease the unimaginable pain of the victims'
loved ones, but I'm not that wise. I'm barely capable of thinking.
Like many others, I've spent the hours since Tuesday
morning staring at the television screen, sometimes crying, sometimes
furious, but mostly just stunned. What I can't get out of my
mind is the fact that they used our own planes. I grew up in
the Cold War, when we always pictured the threat as coming in
the form of missiles -- sleek, efficient death machines, unmanned,
hurtling over the North Pole from far away. But what came, instead,
were our own commercial airliners, big friendly flying buses
coming from Newark and Boston with innocent people on board.
Red, white and blue planes, with ``United'' and ``American''
written on the side. The planes you've flown in and I've flown
in. That's what they used to attack us.
They were able to do it in part because our airport
security is pathetic. But mainly they were able to do it because
we are an open and trusting society that simply is not set up
to cope with evil men, right here among us, who want to kill
as many Americans as they can.That's what's so hard to comprehend:
They want us to die just for being Americans. They don't care
which Americans die: military Americans, civilian Americans,
young Americans, old Americans. Baby Americans. They don't care.
To them, we're all mortal enemies. The truth is that most Americans,
until Tuesday, were only dimly aware of their existence, and
posed no threat to them. But that doesn't matter to them; all
that matters is that we're Americans. And so they used our own
planes to kill us. And then their supporters celebrated in the
streets.
I'm not naive about my country. My country is definitely
not always right; my country has at times been terribly wrong.
But I know this about Americans: We don't set out to kill innocent
people. We don't cheer when innocent people die.
A DECENT PEOPLE -- The people who did this
to us are monsters; the people who cheered them have hate-sickened
minds. One reason they can cheer is that they know we would never
do to them what their heroes did to us, even though we could,
a thousand times worse. They know that when we hunt down the
monsters, we will try hard not to harm the innocent. Those are
the handcuffs we willingly wear, because for all our flaws, we
are a decent people. And now we are a traumatized people. The
TV commentators keep saying that the attacks have 
awakened
a ``sleeping giant.'' And I guess we do look like a giant, to
the rest of the world. But when I look around, I don't see a
giant: I see millions of individuals -- the resilient and caring
citizens of New York and Washington; the incredibly brave firefighters,
police officers and rescue workers risking their lives in the
dust and flames; the politicians standing on the steps of the
Capitol and singing an off-key rendition of God Bless America
that, corny as it was, had me weeping; the reporters and photographers
who have not slept, and will not sleep, as long as there is news
to report; the people in my community, and communities across
America, lining up to give blood, wishing they could do more.
A GOOD COUNTRY -- No, I don't see a giant.
What I see is Americans. We may have the power of a giant, but
we also have the heart of a good and generous people, and we
will get through this. We will grieve for our dead, and tend
to our wounded, and repair the damage, and tighten our security,
and put our planes back in the air. Eventually most of us, the
ones lucky enough not to have lost somebody, will resume our
lives. Some day, our country will track down the rest of the
monsters behind this, and make them pay, and I suppose that will
make most of us feel a little better. But revenge and hatred
won't be why we'll go on. We'll go on because we know this is
a good country, a country worth keeping. Those who would destroy
it only make us see more clearly how precious it is.
*Dave Barry is a syndicated humor columnist
who works for both the Miami 
Herald
newspaper and Tropic Magazine(a Miami-area local magazine). His
Pulitzer Prize-winning articles appear in hundreds of newspapers
every week. . Barry writes about various major issues relating
to the international economy, the future of democracy, the social
infrastructure and exploding toilets.
