Words of comfort, rage, peace

[JeffB]

Thanks everyone for posting. Arden, please tell your daughter that her poem was beautiful.

[Arden_Ranger]

*Originally posted by JeffB *
**Thanks everyone for posting. Arden, please tell your daughter that her poem was beautiful. **

I would if she wrote it.

Maybe I wasn’t clear. Someone else posted that on the list I belong to. Her daughter wrote it.

But I’ll pass on your praise.

[JeffB]

Oops. I thought you meant you posted the same message earlier on the list. Thanks anyway.

I decided I couldn’t listen to the radio any longer and decided to put a CD of Ladysmith Black Mambazo in. This quote by founder Joseph Shabalala was on the inside:

Singing cleanses the soul, when the soul is clean everything is open … our music is about peace and harmony, it breaks through boundaries of colour, religion and nationality with a message of hope.

Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s music truly is beautiful. Listening to it right now does help cleanse the soul. It truly does break through boundaries, including language boundaries. I love to listen to their music even when I don’t understand the words.

[JeffB]

*Originally posted by Zaphod Beeblebrox *
My thoughts go out to all the people who’ve lost loved ones, all the people who were hurt or killed, and all the people who fear they might have lost loved ones.

I’m sorry, I can’t say anything more meaningful or coherent than that.

Zaphod, I know what you mean. That’s why I turned to the words of others. I think what you said was very meaningful and coherent.

[Zyada]

CNN has a very moving picture on their site:

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/us/0109/terror/content19.ny.html

[ITR_champion]

From another message board:

Fear is only your daily bread if you choose to eat it … Tomorrow the sun rises for most of us, and the Post Office will be open, coffee will need to be brewed, etc.

[dropzone]

“Do you like Kipling?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never Kipled.”

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Not comforting, not peaceful, but some perspective from someone who was in on an invasion of Afghanistan.

[Ferggie]

Do not go gently into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
–Dylan Thomas

[TheOtherOne]

Not necessarily comforting, but an interesting poem that was immediately brought to mind:

Nothing but iron
Brick and cement
Blood, detritus
And sentiment

A glass of wine at the end of time
The waves beat grim and slow
A glass of wine at the end of time
Love me, love and go

A glass of wine at the end of time
An old victrola spins
A glass of wine at the end of time
Where another world begins

What was the promise?
How did we fare?
Will we be mourned?
Does anyone care?

A glass of wine at the end of time
The waves beat grim and slow
A glass of wine at the end of time
Shatter the glass and go.

     ~Robert Hunter

“you can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”

[Humble_Servant]

Here’s more Kipling–I remembered the “crimes that we call new” line, but I had to google to get the name of the poem which turned out to be The Holy War:

All enemy divisions,
Recruits of every class,
And highly-screened positions
For flame or poison-gas;
The craf that we call modern,
The crimes that we call new,
John Bunyan had 'em typed and filed
In sixteen eighty-two.

.And here’s another I got in an email today, from a World War II sermon:

I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on close inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache: it is our nature.

[orion007]

“Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage” -Smashing Pumpkins, Bullet with Butterfly Wings

Too young to give blood and to young to join the Army or anything and I’m way too far away from NY to help there sigh

[Osakadave]

For the perpetrators:

“For whereas in general the conspirator has to fear before the execution of his plot, in this case he has also to fear the sequel to the crime; because on account of it he has the people for an enemy, and thus cannot hope for any escape.”

and

“…the harm one does to a man must be such as to obviate any fear of revenge”
(Nicolo Machiavelli)

[Verrain]

Sgt. Benton: “What do we do now?”
2nd Doctor: “Keep it confused. Feed it with useless information. I wonder if I have a television set handy…”
-The Three Doctors

7th Doctor: “Your species has the most amazing capacity for self deception matched only by its ingenuity when trying to destroy itself.”
– Remembrance of the Daleks.

7th Doctor: Weapons. Always useless in the end.
Remembrance of the Daleks

Ace: I want to make them very, very unhappy!
7th Doctor: Don’t worry, Ace, we will.
The Happiness Patrol

Ace: There must be things you hate.
7th Doctor: I can’t stand burnt toast. I loathe bus terminals. Full of lost luggage and lost souls. Then there’s unrequited love, and tyranny, and cruelty.
Ghost Light

4th Doctor: Homo sapiens. What an inventive, invincible species. It’s only been a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny,defenseless bipeds. They’ve survived flood, famine and plague. They’ve survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new
life. Ready to outsit eternity. They’re indomitable …indomitable.
The Ark in Space

4th Doctor: You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don’t alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit the views, which can be uncomfortable, if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.
The Face of Evil

5th Doctor: There should have been another way!
Warriors of the Deep

Davros: The universe is at war, Doctor. Name one planet whose history is not littered with atrocities and ambition for empire. It is a universal way of life.
5th Doctor: Which I do not accept.
Resurrection of the Daleks

The Marshall: “You see now why we need your help. We must have the weapon that will wipe the Zeons clear of our skies once and for all! Can you provide it?”

4th Doctor: “Yes, I think so.”

The Marshall: “What is it?”

4th Doctor: “Peace.”
The Armageddon Factor