jekyllandhyde

For some reason last night I found myself thinking about the 7/7 bombings in London, when I was over there for a study abrad trip in 2005. I had been staying in a hotel in London, visiting my sister and her husband (who live there) before going to Oxford for my study abroad term. We didn't have classes on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays, and on Thrusday, July 7, before I went to my morning class, I just finished making my plans to take up my old room in a London hotel in Russel Square. As my morning class let out, one of my American classmates announced that she had just read on her cell phone that seven different bombs had gone off in London; six on the underground tube lines and one on a bus on the street.

I rushed back to my dorm room at Oriel College and called my sister, who was okay. It was strange, though; that was her last day of classes, and she was running late but she wasn't in a hurry because they were only having a party in class. One of the tube lines that was bombed was the one she took. Had she been on time, she would have had a 1 in 3 chance of being on the train that was bombed.

The bus that was bombed was in Russel Square, and it happened right around the corner from where my hotel would have been. If it had happened a day later and I had been there, I probably would have heard the explosion and seen the aftermath (and from what I heard, the aftermath was a scene out of a war zone, with people missing limbs and wounded and dead bodies splayed across the street).

A few weeks later, after my classes in Oxford had ended, I went back to London for the final weekend before heading home. I was trying to meet my sister and brother-in-law at a restaurant and got lost on the way to a tube station. I was in a pretty deserted area and was looking for a street sign when I walked right by the Russel Square tube station, which had been the sight of both the bus bombing and one of the tube bombings. I just stopped and stared; people had placed memorials all along the closed entrance. One person had placed a teddy bear next to the picture of a little kid who had been killed. For some reason that one particular item really got to me, and I almost started crying.

I also thought about the e-mail my jerkoff professor sent me when he changed his mind about giving me a reference for grad school; he said I didn't understand how the world worked because I had unthinkingly checked the box on my applications that accepted my right to read what my references said about me after I got accepted. I should have e-mailed him back last night. I don't know how the world works? I saw enough about how the world fucking works in those five minutes I stared silently at the makeshift Russel Square memorial, not to mention the countless other experiences I could list off here.

One reason I think I'm so disillusioned with things right now is because, on one end, you have the Idiot Bush and his cronies who take the very real threat of terrorism and use it for their own ends; that I don't think I'll ever be able to forgive. But on the other end you have arch-liberals who think that terrorists (not other governments, mind you, but actual terrorists -- there is a difference, despite what Bush says) can be reasoned with simply by pulling the army out of their countries. If someone willingly kills himself and innocent people, including children, they're passed the point of being reasoned with. They need to be stopped, but Bush is more interested in his New American Century Project bullshit and others are too busy saying the opposite of everything he says that they don't even stop to acknowledge that there really are people out there who need to be stopped.

I have another diatribe on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I think I'll save my faux pearls of wisdom on that subject for my next blog.