What a week!

Olivia and Xavier, eight years old, were not even a twinkle in their parents eyes on September 11, 2001. This world, since that awful day, has been what they know. They have been brought up to be careful. They know about lock downs at school when there is the faintest hint of danger, and no doubt they know how their parents may suddenly clutch them close because we all fear for our kids. They have begun their journey through a childhood of strict parameters and helicopter parents and taking your shoes off at airport security. Lots of rules guide their lives.
Here, these kids are doing what kids do in the moment. They have mixed cornstarch and water and they are exploring that strange delicious sensation of dry and wet. They have made a real mess all over everything and they are having a grand time at it! Seems we can't entirely kill childhood, but over the last ten years we have certainly tried.
The week's news was amazing. Beginning with a royal wedding of rather dim but attractive participants, and then the startling assassination of Bin Laden, we went from fancy tea cakes to a grizzly murder of an entirely evil person.
So many of us did not go into the streets to celebrate Osama's death. But we are glad he's gone from this earth.
Personally, I do not need to see photos of Osama's bloody body. Eventually those photos will surface. We live in our era after all. I feel somewhat hollow after this week. The Royal wedding was such fluff. I am still exhausted by terrorists and the way they changed our lives. We were certainly cheated out of a decade, and maybe more to come. We have spent our money and the lives of so many in battling this evil.
This decade changed our country. I think the political polarization we now see comes from a large component of fear. What I think of as the mean spirits and solipsism of the extreme right may come from a profound fear. We were attacked! I need to protect my own! Get guns! Keep the women in back (men dictating women's options), be suspicious of anyone different from you- liberals, especially elite blacks, muslims, gays, anyone brown and speaking another language but English. Man the barriers! Get rid of threats, including those nasty bugs, snakes, threatened wildlife of all kinds. Need to protect our own, the American way of life. Drill, baby, drill! Too scary to think about changing one's ideas about how we use energy, too scary to think about the facts of climate change.
Nine Eleven was indeed scary! Such a horror was bound to change us.
I just hope that we can move on. I want us to get out of the middle east and address the humanitarian problems of this earth, and even of this country.