This is the nightmare that comes
true, the nightmare from which we cannot awake. The
nightmare that leaves us numb and hollow-eyed and fumbling when
our children ask why anyone would do such a horrible thing.
To make a political statement -- that's the answer,
isn't it? That's what they say is going on here. Somebody wanted
to make a point, somebody who didn't like the United States very
much. So 
their solution was
to arrange a nightmare. Fanatics hijack planes full of innocent
people and crash them into buildings packed with more innocent
people. Thousands die, while thousands more are terribly injured.
And in some distant land, there's dancing in the
streets.
It's a difficult thing to explain to our kids,
especially because we don't actually understand it ourselves.
Oh, we can talk about ancient feuds and holy wars,
but it all boils down to slaughter -- wanton, cowardly, gleeful
slaughter. No reasonable explanation exists, and that's probably
what we ought to tell our children -- the awful truth. Level
with them.
Kids, don't waste your time trying to understand
such lunacy. The lesson here is brutally simple: No place is
safe. No one is out of reach.
This is the world they're inheriting, God help
them.
For now we're left with feelings beyond despair
and helplessness -- a vacant, bleary addiction that glues us
to the television, where 
we
watch the smoking rubble and the body bags and the replays that
always end the same way. . . . The plane hits the building, the
building falls down. It's like a scene out of a disaster movie,
except it really happened. It's happening still.
All we can do is shake our heads and be thankful
that none of our loved ones was on any of those airliners, or
in any of those buildings. And we can weep for those who were
lost and those they left behind.
Before long we'll know exactly how many people
perished yesterday morning, and who they were. We'll hear stories
of astonishing valor and of crushing sorrow.
Slowly, America will get back to business. The
stock markets and airports will reopen, and the branches of government
will reconvene. Then the cold consuming task of investigation
will commence, producing mountains of evidence. Eventually we'll
learn not only who staged the attack on New York and Washington,
D.C., but precisely how it was executed.
We'll know the names and code names of the suicide
hijackers, how they selected their flights, how they thwarted
airport security and perhaps even how they gained control of
the planes.
In this way the nightmare will be exhaustively
annotated, but it won't go away.
Perhaps every modern generation of Americans is
doomed to have an unthinkable tragedy imbedded in its psyche.
For my parents' generation,
it was Pearl Harbor; for mine, the assassinations of the Kennedys
and Martin Luther King.
Like yesterday's terrorist attack, those events
seemed inconceivable at the time. The images have never lost
their impact and never stopped haunting -- the USS Arizona, billowing
black smoke into the Hawaiian sky; the Zapruder film, freezing
the instant that President Kennedy's head was blown apart in
Dallas.
And now the towers of the World Trade Center, crumbling
in an inferno.
Even if a day comes when we know all there is to
know about this crime,
it will still defy comprehension.
History is full of such horrors and bloodbaths,
unleashed on a whim -- somebody wanting to make a political statement,
somebody wanting to make a point.
As our children grow older, they'll realize the
futility of searching for logic in heartless evil. They'll stop
asking why, for the same reasons we stopped asking. The answer
is soul-deadening, the stuff of nightmares.
Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen is the author
of several humorous novels, including Tourist Season and Strip
Tease,
which came out as a movie
in 1996. Carl wasborn and raised in South Florida and presently
lives in Tavernier, smack in the middle of the Florida Keys.
He attended Emory University and was graduated with a degree
in journalism from the University of Florida at Gainesville in
1974.
