I was standing in Central Park, at the north end of the great lawn, watching huge column of smoke rise where the twin towers used to stand when I realized that we were under attack, on our own soil, for the first time in over a 100 years.

In the weeks that followed I, along with just about everyone who could, volunteered with the Red Cross.

I had the un-glamorous job of running freshly charged walkie-talkies to those that needed them, and taking the run-down ones back to the recharging station.

My sister worked in a different kind of recharge station – the tents by the pit where the exhausted and demoralized emergency workers came for juice, snacks, a massage, a friendly smile from a pretty girl, a break from the destruction and carnage.  (Years later she is left with some of the breathing problems that afflict many of those rescue workers from breathing the particles in the air).

I remember vividly when I first had the thought that I wanted to look into whether I was too old to enlist in the Marine Corps.

The Marines go in first.  I wanted to go in first.

More than a year later, when the first bombs started landing in what the White House was calling the “Shock and Awe” campaign.  I took the news outwardly soberly – but something inside of me smiled.  Something inside felt a satisfaction in being on the team that had so much power.  There was a deep, primitive pleasure in having felt so impotent for so long, and now being able to watch on TV as our precise, laser guided missiles zoomed through car windows to get the bad guys.

Never mind that I knew that, in spite of the messages coming from the White House, that Iraq did not participate in the attacks of 9/11.

Never mind that I knew that Osama bin Laden, as a radical islamist, was hated and feared by Sadam Hussein’s secular regime.  The President said that there was reliable intelligence that they had come to regard my country as the common enemy and that Sadam was prepared to give Al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction.

Now, it retrospect, we all realize that Sadam Hussein had no WMDs, he had no link to Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda, and we all know that while the Iraqis suffered under the Baathist government, they are suffering a great deal more now, and for reasons that are at best murky, and at worst criminal.

We also know, by looking at examples like Egypt, that a tyrannical government can be brought down without hundreds of thousands of people being crushed beneath giant bombs that fall from a silent night sky, dropped by stealth aircraft, tearing human bodies to shreds; entire neighborhoods, without warning.

So how did this war happen?

It was so easy to talk me into the idea of war because I was standing there watching when my city was attacked.

And I am a dyed-in-the-wool, New York, bleeding heart, pacifist liberal.

So the thing that we must all soberly regard, is that like me, presidents, generals, rebel leaders, and diplomats are all humans.

The young men who lived in neighborhoods flattened by American bombs have no choice but to feel EXACTLY as I felt that day in Central Park, watching the twin towers burn, realizing that we were under attack, and wanting to strike back.

Watching their homes burn, mourning the deaths of friends, family members, and friends of friends, hearing tales of tragedy and narrow escape over morning coffee… it would be absurd to believe that they would not be filled with thoughts of fighting back, of using their lives up in the great cause of protecting their home land.

The wars we are fighting did not happen because Osama bin Laden attacked the United States, and they didn’t happen because of Big Oil interests, or because George Bush lied, or because Sadam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or because the Americans refused to move their bases out of Saudi Arabia, or because of “intelligence failures”.

The wars happened because of the human mind.  Because of ideas that spread in conversations that reached critical mass and became the will of a people.  These ideas spread through news media, through the internet, and through conversations in bars and coffee shops– and they control the safety,  and the peril, and the very future of us all.

And as it stands right now, nobody is making any effort to guide, much less control these ideas.

But YOU can.  Learn how here.

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