I tried several times yesterday to write something about the destruction of the World Trade Center and the slaughter of what will doubtless turn out to be thousands of people, but kept giving up after a sentence or two. What can one say in the face of such evil that isn’t dwarfed by the magnitude of the devastation? How does one respond to the news that there are Palestinian people dancing in the street at the news that droves of people who had nothing to do with American foreign policy have been killed? What does one tell the people who are now fatherless and widowed because someone in their family was excited about that new job in the World Trade Center?

Grief that big, horror that huge, doesn’t go down in a single bite. We hear about it, we choke on it, it distends our throats, and still there’s more to swallow. We’re kicked in the stomach repeatedly all day. We want to kill someone. We want to lay down and die ourselves. We want to hold our spouses, our children, and shut the rest of the world out. We want to throw up, to get this poison out of our system, to press our faces to the cold tile next to the toilet and not think, not feel, just survive.

Horror. Horror. Horror.