Underground Terror

I started a post on Wednesday night about how I'd heard the nascent convict Lil' Kim's new single, "Shut Up!" on 93.9 WKYS' "New Joint of the Day." "New Joint" is one of those love-it-or-shove it call-in sessions for listeners, which is really just a way for music suits to determine the potential success of a single in the marketplace. Anyway, my post was gonna be all about how I envision a radio landscape where hip hop radio edits will essentially be a beat from a Moog machine interspersed with the artists occasional "uhs" and "yeahs" 'cause the lyrics will have been wiped offa the airwaves. I don't know that there's more than two verses in "Shut Up!" that are free of George Carlin's seven dirty words. Take a listen for yourselves, the song is available for a listen on the Lil' Kim's fansite.

So that was what I was going to write about.

Then my husband woke me up on Thursday morning to tell me that London's Underground and a mass transit bus had been bombed.

All of the feelings from 9/11, the Bali bombings, the Madrid bombings, came slamming back. There was no relief that it wasn't my country, my city, my subway. I was just sick, because they are my people. Just like I would on any given Thursday morning, they were people who were just trying to go to work, put in their eight hours, and come home. They weren't soldiers, or politicians. They were shopkeepers, accountants, bus drivers, secretaries. They were innocents.

The people who organized the bombings might say they aren't innocent, that they voted the people into power who make the decisions to go to war and drop bombs on middle eastern villages. They might say they are retaliating for the innocent lives lost in their countries. And the blame will be passed back and forth and back again like a hot coal. It's like the conflict between Israel and Palestine -- if you try to figure out who did harm to whom first, you are lead back three millenia.

That way lies madness.

It's just sad, and painful, and tragic and it will only result in more violence. I wish I had something to say that would pierce the sadness. But what is there to say, honestly, that provides hope? That maybe in one, five, twenty, a thousand years peace will flow?

Well, I actually do have one nugget of hope. One of my co-workers had a vacation planned to London. Her plane takes off today. And she still decided to go.