Sometimes a man…
Sometimes the beauty of life…
Sometimes…it feels…

I don’t have a story to tell because all I did was turn on the television and call my best friend.  My daughter Emma asked me where we were saying her best friend’s mom was flying around Boston that day and just missed the flight that crashed into the first tower.  I only remember it for what I didn’t know.  I didn’t know that it was a terrorist act.  I didn’t know that Osama Bin Laden was that real.  I didn’t know that “they” hated us.  I didn’t know what we did to make them hate us.  I didn’t know that the towers would fall. I didn’t know that people would jump out of the windows to keep from burning or dying from smoke inhalation.  I didn’t know that the firefighters would rush in just before the towers fell.  I didn’t know there would be two planes to hit the towers. I didn’t know it could be so easy to execute such an elegant, well planned, unavoidable attack on American soil.  I didn’t know that it would be used to justify two wars that are mostly still ongoing.

What could I tell my daughter about that day?  How could I tell her that those two wars ended up killing over six thousand more American soldiers.

Operation Iraqi Freedom: 4,442

Operation Enduring Freedom: 1,584

These deaths, I have to tell her, had nothing to do with 9/11 except in the way that it made us all so afraid that we would do anything, accept anything.  And then finally, I’d have to tell her that it wasn’t about us that day: it never should have been. It was only about those who died.  It was about them and it should always be about them.

And yeah, it changed everything.  My heart still breaks for the victims. And the anger at our government for what we did after that, even though the world maybe feels slightly safer without Saddam Hussein, still resonates.  But it’s not about me.  It never was.

This from US Weekly’s story about Oksana supposedly trying to extort 10 million from Mel Gibson to keep audio tapes under wraps.

Bless Mel’s heart
because he made a stupid decision leaving Robin for this money hungry tramp looking for a free ride.
That’s just plain wrong!
But she got the reaction she was plotting to get!
Bimbo!
I don’t beleive anything this sorry excuse for a women says.
Whey would she be recording conversations w/the father of her child if she wasn’t out for something.
She’s ugly and Mel has some amazing talent.
The man is a victim of this barracuda
who is just trying to
extort millions from him
using that baby she had,
without his permission,
she just set him up
and got pregnant to entrap him
and then is going in for the kill.
Poor Man

I would bet Oksana provokes Mel into his rants.
She looks like a Bittch and probably pushes Mel’s buttons.

Ok, now this I actually believe.
That Russian euro trash
isn’t worth the clothes on her back.
She gets uglier with each photo I see of her.
She’s probably a Russian spy.

As more details come to light about the Fritzl case, one of the weirdest and saddest stories I’ve ever read, it has reinforced the idea that nothing good comes from being blindly obedient. If you don’t question authority bad people get away with things. I’ve learned it in my own personal life, having been involved with a psychotic man who put up a good front but was so unhinged beneath the surface no one dared disrupt his state of mind for fear of a tantrum at best. Herr Fritzl, however, is a different animal altogether. He truly doesn’t deserve to live. I wish someone would lock him in a dark room for the remainder of his days.

What continues to trouble me is how no one questioned his weird behavior. No one dug deeper when he said his daughter ran away to join a cult. What cult? Where was it? Why not inform the police so they could go look for her? None of the siblings nor the mother nor the teachers at the school seemed to care about Elisabeth’s whereabouts. If one person in the long chain had perhaps they could have spared this poor woman’s wasted life at the hands of a living demon. Neighbors who heard childlike noises in the cellar, a wife whose husband had rape convictions on his record and was a known sex addict yet he never had sex with her, preferring instead to have it with his own daughter — children mysteriously showing up the doorstep, all of whom probably looked a little too much alike…question authority, even if it means risking everything to do so. And while you’re at it, trust only a very few. In some cases, you can’t even trust your own husband, as this case, and many others like it, illustrates.